Go Green and Boost Business Performance
Turn the clocks back 10-20 years ago, and businesses were all about their size and power. However, in the boom of the environmental awareness and green business, this trend has been neutralized of nearly all its power. Now customers look to see how environmentally aware a business is; they may even refuse to buy from a business that does not consider this important. Not only that, but going green can actually boost your internal business performance, even if you don’t gain a single new customer.
Green business is all about reducing your environmental footprint. What is one of the biggest environmental concerns for offices and businesses? Paper; loads of paper are used every day. The more paper that is being used, the more trees that have to be cut down, and this is most certainly not green. To make the office greener, many businesses are turning towards electronic programs, rather than use paper.
One manifestation of this is payroll software. The traditional payroll system is performed on paper, but that gets messy and it eats up all that paper. By switching over to payroll software, you get several benefits. Software is more accurate, it’s faster and you don’t need to worry about buying reams and reams of paper. Yes, it is more expensive at first, but it pays for itself within a few weeks or months.
Other ways of going green are fairly simple, and you should post your efforts all over your website so customers are aware of what you are doing. Nearly every business has a printer, and this produces a lot of used toner cartridges. The first thing you should do is start an internal recycling program to get all of them out of your business. Talk with printer suppliers about getting less toxic printing supplies as well, to decrease your footprint.
Conduct an energy audit and see how much power you are using. Most offices use much more power than they really need, and this drives up operating costs. Through some simple exercises, you can reduce energy usage, have a greener office and decrease your operating costs. Just turn off lights when they aren’t being used, turn off computers if they are not needed, and look around at your appliances and anything else that is consuming energy. Can you turn it off, or set it to a lower power level? Over a few months you should see a large dip in your power costs.
Do you travel for business purposes? Sometimes this is a necessary evil, but it can be largely offset through programs that enable you to speak with other people over the computer, emulating the face-to-face experience. This reduces your carbon footprint. Not only that, but you can purchase carbon offsetting to make up for travel you do have to do.
Do you send out items or packets? A major problem with many businesses is that they use bulky boxes that are made from a lot of cardboard, and they stuff the box with too many shipping supplies. First, get lighter materials and use less packing. Also, buy the green alternatives of packing. These are typically made from starch and they biodegrade very quickly, unlike the other packing materials that can take years to finally decompose.
These all help your business do better, but you also want your customers to notice. Aside from telling them on your website and social networking accounts, you should send out surveys to people to have them review your green actions. Do they notice that you are going green, and do they have suggestions? Not only can you use this to gain information about your customers, but they may give you some useful ideas.
Going green is typically a painless procedure that involves a lot of small changes. Using payroll software to reduce paper waste, using less shipping and packing materials and traveling less are all easy to do, and they save your business money at the same time.
Posted in 
Tags: