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3 Ways Your Business Can Become More Sustainable
Thu Aug 03, 2023 | Ameritel Corporation
Implementing more sustainable business practices can include anything from small goals that your team sets to taking a step back and considering the bigger picture. It’s crucial that your company changes to more sustainable workflows and actively chooses eco-friendly initiatives that everyone on your team is working towards. Sustainable practices are critical for several reasons, including the reduction of pollution and creating an open and honest relationship with investors and future clients.
Sustainability means looking after and avoiding the depletion of the world’s natural resources. It can also be about balancing our ecological system, including economic and social consciousness.
In the framework of a business, this means setting goals for your team to reduce waste in the office and to working with outreach programs in your community. Everything from choosing green-friendly office supplies to having your team members volunteer or fundraise for an organization close to their hearts is sustainability. Combining all these ideas together should be your ultimate goal.
To make the process easier for you, we’ve put together this list of three ways your team can work towards a sustainable future.
1. Set Realistic Sustainability Goals
As with most things your business sets out to do, it’s important to sit down and brainstorm. Be realistic in the goals that you’re setting and make sure they work for everyone on your team. It’s nice to want to plunge headfirst into environmentally conscious workflows and practices, but it might not be feasible to juggle too many goals at once.
Decide as a group what initiatives you’d like your team to put into practice and then set some future goals for after you’ve succeeded. This will help motivate everyone in the office to work towards bettering the environment both in the present and in the future.
Take our team. We’ve set our own green initiative goals, including:
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Setting up separate trash bins for bottles, cans, and non-recyclables in our lunchrooms.
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Providing blue bins under every workstation for paper recycling.
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Keeping reusable cardboard boxes to be recycled or used to ship consumables out.
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All inbound packing materials are recycled for outbound shipping.
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Using biodegradable packing peanuts as needed.
Being realistic with your goals also means choosing initiatives that will meet the needs of your team. It’s nice to want to go entirely paperless, for example, but having specific documents printed could be deeply rooted in current workflows. That’s why it’s important to take a step back and think about less disruptive ways you can create a sustainable office. Striking up a compromise can be a great place to start. In the context of our example, you could consider reducing the number of pages printed instead of going entirely paperless. Which brings us to our next point!
2. Review Your Office’s Printing Practices
Your team should review how printing fits into your workflows. Just like we mentioned earlier, printed documents may be important to your team. People might find it easier to remember information read on a physical document and keeping physical records may be required to meet certain legal compliances. Whatever the reason for printing documents in the office, it’s still worth finding new ways to manage print and meet sustainability goals without sacrificing the productivity of your team.
One greener choice is to reduce excessive print waste in your office. You can do this by having your printer set to automatically duplex print (print double-sided) and to print in black and white. You can also consider getting managed print services.
3. Work with Other Teams to Think Green
If you’re struggling with setting sustainability goals, reducing print waste, or optimizing the current workflows in your office in an eco-friendly way then it might be time to get an outside perspective. Sometimes when you’re too close to something it can be hard to think outside of the box. Working with other teams who have different skill sets will alleviate some of your team’s stress and further refine your new initiatives.
With more diverse and varied experiences in the mix, your company will gain a more accurate perspective on what works and what doesn’t. Our own team, for example, works frequently with those in the government, healthcare, legal, financial, educational, and non-profit sectors.
Every team and industry has unique needs that must be considered when setting new goals. Sustainability will look different for teams in these varied fields. Consulting with professionals who understand this is essential when defining what sustainability will mean for your organization. Make sure to work with people who are open and honest about their own sustainability goals and who have ample experience collaborating with teams like yours.
Looking to create new green initiatives for your business? We can help your business implement eco-friendly changes. Connect with our team today.
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