There’s a lot of excitement out there right now about “going green”. Rightfully so!
With global concerns regarding carbon emissions, depletion of natural resources, and rapidly accelerating natural disasters, the business community has emerged as a potentially significant player in the race to make our planet healthy again.
Many organizations are investing in green building practices, waste reduction, and other programs that contribute to a healthier environment. Whether these are the results of political and public pressure or of longer-term insight into how a depleted environment will affect an industry, the fact is that going green is currently en vogue and if your organization hasn’t given some thought to crafting a green strategy, you may quickly fall out of favour with both regulatory and consumer bodies alike.
A green strategy no longer means just the three “R’s” (reduce, reuse, recycle). Organizations are looking for ways to make a more significant impact and introduce innovative concepts that can provide a competitive advantage not just as a supplier but as an employer of choice. Technology providers haven’t lost the plot, either, and have recognized an opportunity to offer solutions that enable the workforce to work “greener” by reducing travel (carbon emissions), reducing paper and all related benefits.
Advanced collaboration and communication tools offer workers the ability to interact, plan, strategize and deliver across regions, whether these are global (across the world) or local (across the street). While the benefits of these tools have been heralded for years, only now have they reached a level of maturity that mimics the way we naturally work and makes sharing of information available within a click or two with little setup. This type of back-end integration across product suites is what will make these kinds of tools easy to adopt for the masses. Collaboration and communications tools can include anything from instant messaging, web repositories, web conferences, portals and more.
In one case study of a regionally disparate work team, our client was travelling up to 3 weeks out of every month. We calculated that with airline flights, cab rides and ferry trips, this resulted in a few tonnes of carbon emissions per year, contributed by just one individual. Multiply that by the entire workforce, and you get the picture. We were able to help this one individual reduce her travel by a whopping 85% by providing her with collaboration and communication tools and a strategy for adoption across her team. As you can imagine, the environmental impact is significant and real. Extrapolated across her team and she had a story for the press.
But wait… there’s more. In addition to contributing to the reduction in an organization’s carbon footprint, these tools introduced other follow-on benefits which may be even more impactful to the workers themselves:
- Time savings. Depending on how much each individual was already travelling, all of the hours spent getting to and from airports or even running across the block to the other office, can now be focused on productive activities (likely meaning less time working in the evening after the kids have gone to bed).
- Work/Life balance. Ask anyone who travels a lot for work – it ain’t glamourous. Whether it means less time with family, reduced physical activity, fatigue… all of these side effects add up and wear you down. Reducing travel means getting these quality elements of life back. In addition, these tools may provide the opportunity to enable more flexible work schedules and locations, which is ideal for the more than 30% of the population who is caring for loved ones or who are new parents or may choose to live far from the urban centre due to cost of living or lifestyle choices.
- Improved efficiency. Workers who have adopted these tools report more targeted and succinct communications, in real time as opposed to the linear progression of a deliverable normally associated with email communications. Additionally, all those emails in the inbox are drastically reduced as tools like instant messaging replace the quick questions and ad hoc conversations. Web conferencing tends to produce similar efficiencies as participants can come together on a decision or deliverable quickly rather than waiting for responses and reviewing endless iterations of documents, etc.
- Employee satisfaction. When employers recognize that workers are people too and are happiest when able to accommodate the rest of their lives while remaining productive and delivering value to their employers, they are more likely to retain their staff and attract newer, younger staff. Workers entering the workforce now are expecting the provision of advanced productivity tools and won’t settle for long without them. As our demographic becomes quite top-heavy, it will become more imperative to be able to attract and retain staff who are able to produce more with less.
So, whether delivering on a green strategy or making workers happy and more efficient is keeping you up at night, you may consider investigating the adoption of advanced productivity tools that enable global teams to work together without travel and contribute to the overall satisfaction of your staff.