How Your Business Can Go Green

What do Millennials and Baby Boomers have in common? In a 2014 Nielsen study, both of them are apparently willing to pay more for products and services from companies who are committed to sustainability and protecting the environment.

So, if protecting Mother Earth is not enough motivation to go green with your business, you can add profit and more customers to the list as well.

By adopting “green” practices, you can advertise yourself as a green company as well. But please, implement actual environment-friendly policies before advertising yourself as such, or else you are just another fraudulent company. 

So how do you start going green? Here are some simple tips that you can follow:

Allow Telecommuting or Work from home

There are a lot of benefits to implementing a telecommuting policy. For the company, they would not need a big office to accommodate all their employees. With the people who can work from home, at home; the only people in the office are the people who needs to be there. This means the company can rent out a smaller and cheaper office instead of a big and expensive one.

For employees, they get to work at the comfort of their own home. No need to get up early, taking a bath is optional, no need to dress up unless there is a video conference, and no commuting. As a result, they get to spend more time with their families.

And lastly, for the environment. With more people working at home, there will be less people using cars. Less cars on the road means less carbon emissions. Fewer carbon emissions means less pollution as well.

Get an Energy Efficient Office

Another cause of increased carbon emissions are buildings with inefficient use of energy. So why not choose offices that are designed to optimize energy use through super insulated walls, airtight shells, efficient HVAC systems, and triple pane windows. Or better yet, offices that use natural power sources like solar panels or wind turbines.

If you like your current office, you can actually consider renovating it to be more energy efficient. Depending on what state you are on, you may even get rebates and other incentives for your initiatives to turn your office green.

Go Paperless

Eliminate, or at least reduce the need to print out documents. Opt for soft copies that can be saved, edited, and shared multiple times instead of hard copies of files and documents. Print only as needed. Also, use misprints and old prints that are no longer used as scratch paper.

Donate unused materials and equipment

If you have raw materials that can still be used, there are a lot of charities that will gladly take those in and use it for their own campaigns. One example is Habitat for Humanity. With the number of houses, they need to build, building materials that can still be used will be greatly appreciated by the organization.

You can do the same for electronics as well. If you plan to upgrade your equipment, you can either donate them to charity or you can also check with manufacturers if they have trade-in options where you can get discounts for surrendering your old ones.

This is much greener way than just letting them go to waste in a landfill.

Go to the cloud

Do you know how you can implement telecommuting, paperless, and even reduce your needed office space and equipment? You can do this by going to the cloud. Almost everything you need to run your business is on the internet offered for free or on a subscription basis. Access productivity apps like Office 365 and G-Suite from anywhere. Use cloud storage apps like Box and Dropbox. Keep your staff connected at all times with a cloud-hosted phone system like RingCentral. Whatever business need you have, it’s highly likely that there’s a cloud-hosted service that can get it done.

The best part is that there is no need to invest in hardware and infrastructure that can increase your carbon footprints. You just subscribe to what you need, no more and no less.

Work with other Green Companies

The best way to learn about going green is to work with like-minded individuals and organizations. Through interactions, you can pick up best practices and specific use cases on how you can improve business operations while promoting sustainability.

And with more people involved, there can be a more focused overall strategy in turning, not only individual businesses, but also whole communities green.