When you’ve worked hard to set up your own business, the main thing you want to is to see it continue to grow and prosper. You put in the hard work building a brand, creating a marketing strategy, building your customer base, pitching to investors and refining your business processes. Now you want to ensure the long term future growth of your company, and a big part of that consideration has to be making operations more sustainable. This makes sense from almost every perspective – businesses are part of an ecosystem which faces extreme environmental pressures from climate change all the way down the supply chain, you also want to save money by taking your business greener, and you will gain a more favourable perception with customers if you’re seen to be kind to the planet. So making your office a more sustainable place to work should be high up the priority list- there are lots of little ways to get started.
Stop Resource Wastage In Its Tracks
Wasting resources is not only damaging environmentally, it’s also bad for your bottom line, so the first place to start is to address wastage in your working environment. For many this could mean putting lights on a motion sensor system so that they automatically power down if no one is around. Motivate your staff to power down electronics completely and switch them off at the mains every night. Look into getting a water storage system needed if you’re in the right set-up – https://www.teampoly.com.au/ is a great place to start investigating water storage solutions for your business. You could also look into loans and funding which may be available to use solar power in your company as well, especially if you have high electricity usage as a manufacturer.
Set Up A Sustainability Team
Sustainability only really works if it’s adopted from all levels within a business – you as business leader must promote and champion it and make it part of your vision and values, but equally change must be led by staff as well. Setting up a staff team with the express mission to make the business greener can have a very positive impact, driving behavior change from within, raising awareness and accomplishing far more than a purely top-down initiative would. Task them with setting up better recycling facilities or sourcing greener office supplies or energy-efficient appliances. Using informational sessions and working with HR to set up greener transport schemes, a lot can be achieved if your support and empower staff to engage each other.
Think About Transportation
Another great way to go green in your business model would be by exploring different transport options. Obviously, this is going to be more relevant to some business models than others. However, if you are running a logistics company or a business that keeps you on the road, you might want to explore possibilities such as an electric van lease. You’ll use far less energy if you consider a choice like this. You could even consider investing in hybrids and EVs for your business fleet.
Go Completely Paperless
Looking at ways to eliminate paper usage is one of the easiest steps a business can take to lessen their environmental impact. Instigate a digital first policy by using collaborative software such as Slack or Trello to work on projects and proofs without the need for endless paper trails. Switch to a cloud-based invoicing system, and keep digital file copies of documents rather than printed files – these are more easily archived, stored and accessed, so it’s a process improvement as well as an environmental one. With little steps, you can begin to make big changes possible.
