How to do ‘green’ business

The facts are simple. Environmental issues are starting to impact every aspect of life to the extent that no one in business can escape the need to consider green issues as part of their business planning and development.

More than 50 countries signed up to the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, agreeing to cut greenhouse gas emissions – notably carbon dioxide – by five percent below 1990 levels by 2012. However, the majority of the EU signatories are not on track to hit the target, which has accelerated initiatives designed to cut emissions by individual governments.

Aside from the emerging legislative framework, green issues are now firmly part of the mainstream news and social agenda. Irregular weather patterns, oil shortages, pollution and over-development are all prompting an examination of aspects of our lives that touch the environment.

Brand benefits

The environment has become entrenched in corporate social responsibility (CSR), with customers, staff and shareholders motivated by firms that make ethical decisions around the environment.

It is too early to find hard evidence of a direct correlation between businesses that have adopted a green agenda and business performance, but there can be little doubt of its impact on buying decisions and employee motivation. CXOs that fail to implement and drive environmentally responsible practices leave their company exposed to suffer diminished brand value and employee attraction/retention issues. Make no mistake: companies not perceived as green are losing the brand battle.

Light green

Going green requires a holistic approach, but there are some very simple steps CXOs can make to improve their companies’ environmental credentials. Reducing electricity usage is a straightforward task. Having an electrical device on standby can use up to half the electricity required when it is on. Switching appliances such as photocopiers, televisions and PCs off at night can have a dramatic impact in reducing electricity bills and, ultimately, carbon emissions. Alternatively, using low-cost time switches will do the same job but don’t require manual intervention.

Auditing energy usage and taking steps to make reductions can have a dramatic impact on cutting energy usage. Swapping traditional candescent lightbulbs to their energy-saving equivalents can reduce energy usage by as much as 80 percent. Switching electricity suppliers to a renewable source ensures that all the energy that your company uses is produced using alternative energy sources rather than fossil fuels or nuclear.

Office equipment such as PCs can also be recycled using a specialist supplier that will typically rebuild machines for resale or export to developing areas of the world. Policies for the recycling of paper and other office waste are also straightforward to implement and can sometimes cost less than conventional rubbish disposal.

But recycling alone is not enough. Companies need to focus on paper reduction strategies, and encouraging a culture that utilises electronic documents is a simple and effective way to achieve this. Reducing paper wastage also ultimately means more trees are left to offset a company’s carbon emissions. However, for CXOs and companies to be leaders within environmental CSR, they must implement practices across the business that reduce their carbon emissions.

Dark green

Business travel can be one of the largest contributors to a company’s carbon emissions. European business executives claim that less than three out of every 10 meetings require face-to-face communication, and that technology could be utilised instead to gain lost travel time while improving productivity and the quality of business-level decision-making.

A recent survey by Interwise into business travel by European business executives reveals that while executives acknowledge the need for businesses to consider environmental issues, there is little evidence that this is impacting corporate travel policies. Eliminating a long haul from London to New York equates to a 1.2-tonne saving of carbon dioxide, and businesses in Europe must recognise the need to reduce carbon emissions and actively consider environmental issues as part of their corporate travel policies. Virtual meeting technologies now provide the means to make this possible.

An analysis of the effectiveness of business meetings shows that face-to-face meetings are only required when there is a social element as part of the meeting, such as the initial creation of a personal relationship, or where there is a conflict situation that needs to be addressed. In all other situations virtual meetings comprised of a combination of web and voice conferencing offers a credible alternative to business travel.

There can be no doubt green initiatives such as virtual meetings deliver clear environmental and business benefits in carbon emission reductions, motivating stakeholders, increasing cost savings and increasing productivity of executives. These benefits are set to increase as a company’s impact on the environment becomes ever more important. In my opinion, smart CEOs are acting now to reap the benefits later.

Tony Gasson is VP at Interwise. For further information visit www.interwise.com.

Environmental issues and the CXO
By Mike Wenham, Macro 4

For many years going green has been thought to be an expensive but worthy alternative method of doing business. However, as many firms now realise, if done correctly saving resources from an environmental perspective can equate to saving a great deal of money. Nowhere is this more evident than in dealing with one of the biggest wastes: the costs of office printing and paper.

Research shows that in the UK almost two-thirds (60 percent) of office workers throw away between 30 and 50 pieces of printed paper every day each, creating at least 523 million pieces of paper per day. For three quarters of these workers (73 percent), the most common reason for throwing printed paper away is simply that they have read the relevant information and no longer need the paper.

At a conservative estimate of 1p per piece of paper, this immediately accounts for over UK£5 million a day in wasted paper and unnecessary costs. And since most are wasting paper simply because they no longer need the relevant information, this research also suggests it happens largely because of a traditional cultural reliance on unnecessary printing.

This expensive ignorance of non-printing options is rife throughout IT in operational departments as well as in offices. Almost half (42 percent) of UK IT directors admit they do not monitor or manage their office printing costs while 49 percent said that print management information was not important. This means that almost half of UK businesses have no visibility of this cost base.

The good news is that tackling these issues is both simple and very cost-effective, as well as environmentally friendly. Procedural points such as making sure everyone only prints as and when they really need to can yield benefits within very short time-frames. Moving forwards from this the implementation of active document management strategies can deliver massive savings: research has shown that FTSE 100 companies can save up to UK£400 million a year – equivalent to five percent of turnover.

These savings stem from the fact that at the heart of active document and printer output management are two basic tenets – to ‘print for less’, and to ‘print less’. Both of these concepts mean that documents throughout the business are less of a cost burden, but printing less carries with it additional environmental benefits.

At its pinnacle, ensuring the right document is sent to the right person in the right format at the right time and in the right place means there is effectively no wasted printing – though this is in itself can be a difficult project.

The questions to ask from the outset are these: how many sheets of paper are on your printers right now? How many are in the bin? How many sheets of duplicated printed material are lying around your office? How much quicker would it be to simply access business documents online rather than have to print them off and take them with you? In many ways managing output from printers and associated documentation is the lowest hanging fruit for CXOs to pick when looking to reduce costs and streamline processes. However, many companies have yet to make the small but significant changes that will enable these improvements to both productivity and bottom line figures.