For many businesses, greener working practices are now near the top of their list of priorities. If you want to make sure that your business is able to enhance its green credentials and reduce its carbon emissions, getting your whole team on board will be essential.
So what can you do to encourage your team to adopt low carbon habits and how can you generally reduce the emissions your business is responsible for? That’s what we’re going to talk about today, so read on and adopt the practices that’ll help your business the most.
Raise Awareness in the Workplace
The first thing you need to do with your team is make your intentions and plans clear. If you allow your business to carry on as normal, nothing is going to change. That’s why interventions and open discussions with your team are so important. Raise awareness of these issues and make it clear why they’re important and what each member of the team can do to play their part in the necessary changes.
Plan Deliveries Better
The way in which your business handles deliveries is another thing to pay attention to. You’ll want to make sure that you’re not splitting up deliveries too much; instead, it makes sense to streamline them and to have all of your deliveries carried out in one go. That might not always be possible, but you can certainly work with your suppliers to reduce the overall number of deliveries that are carried out each month.
Encourage Less Printing
Printing uses up both ink and paper, and as a result, it’s not particularly great for your business if you’re trying to run it in a more sustainable kind of way. So try to encourage your team to share files digitally and to use devices to browse documents rather than printing them out. If they have tablets and laptops they can take with them on the go, there should rarely be any need to print out documents in physical form.
Create a Strategy for Remote Working
If your business hasn’t yet embraced remote working, it’s something you might at least want to think about. When you have a strategy for allowing remote working inside your business, it makes it a lot easier for you to reduce the emissions your team is responsible for. People won’t need to commute to work, and that makes a huge difference. It can also enhance team morale and outcomes when handled in the right way.
Make it Easier for Employees to Cycle to Work
If you do still need your team to commute to the office, you could look for ways to still reduce the emissions they create in doing so. For example, you can encourage more of your team members to cycle to work. And the best way to do that is to use schemes and to install cycle infrastructure for your team to use. Installing cycle shelters is one simple change that can make a big difference, for example.
Create a Carpooling Scheme
Another way to reduce the emissions associated with commuting to work is by creating a carpooling scheme. That way, people will have an incentive to share a car with colleagues, resulting in fewer cars on the road heading to your workplace each morning, and that can only be a good thing from the standpoint of reducing emissions. There are lots of ways to set up a carpooling scheme, and it’ll obviously only work if you can get your team on board with the change. So make sure that you discuss it openly and gather thoughts and feedback from the team.
Reduce the Amount of Waste Created in the Workplace
Finally, you could also give some thought to how you can reduce the amount of overall waste you create. Encouraging your team to use recycling facilities that you offer in the office is one way to do that. It at least ensures that all of the things that can be recycled actually are recycled and don’t just end up in a landfill. It’s the little changes in habits like this that can make the biggest difference.
As you can see, there are lots of things that can be done to encourage low carbon work habits. So if your business wants to enhance its green credentials and move things in a more positive direction, you’ll definitely want to make the most of the advice above. Each of the ideas we’ve discussed will serve your business well.
