For years there has been the desire by some to create what is effectively the paperless office. As yet it seems that there are very few that have or are even close to achieving such a vision. While there is at least to some extent the potential there to actually fulfill this vision, it would require by most organizations a fairly major shift in the way that they do business.
However for today eliminating the use of paper is not the topic but more so working on ways that you can reduce the wastage. Which in turn can save you money, save paper, and save time. To work on this there is really only one change that you need to make which should help you to do all three. It all comes down to asking two questions.
The first questions is “Do I really need to print this?” Many people have a habit of printing things because they have got into the habit of doing so. This all comes down to what you are printing and if you really need to print it. For example if you had a short email that you need to remember something from would you print it out or could you summarize the information into half a dozen words in your diary. When you really ask yourself if you need to print it or not, you will often find that the answer is not really. One ironic part of this that I often seem to come across is that many companies are now including tag lines at the bottom of their email’s that read along the lines of please consider the environment before printing this email, but then the number of times I have come across pages people have discarded that contain just this line which has gone over the page. It really makes me wonder if anyone has read it.
The second question, takes this a little further once you have decided you need to print what ever it is that you want print. “Do I need to print the whole document?” A good example may be you have just bought a new fax machine for the office, the manual is on a CD, and you think it would be good to have the instructions for setting and using speed dials handy. So you open up the file for the manual and press print, the manual is 212 pages. However you only need page 64 which included the instructions for setting and using speed dials. The other 211 pages are really of no need and sit there un-touched. The cost of the paper is one thing maybe $2 or $3, if you used an inkjet printer that probably used a whole cartridge almost, maybe $15-$25 dollars of ink, if it was toner maybe $5 or $6. So while it may have cost you not a lot of money but it also takes time, on the printer, maybe 10 or 15 minutes. Which holds up other printing, such as potentially customer invoices.
When it comes to printing there are two options, think about it and really consider if you need to print it at all, and then if you decide you do need to print it, consider if you really need to print the whole document. The above example may seem like a over the top example, but consider that it is a potential and putting in some time especially with your staff, to get them aware of the impact of such waste’s can save your business more then you might think. today it might be like the example, but every day there will be instances where a few pages here or 10 pages there may not seem like a much but over a year they quickly add up to thousands of pages, and hundreds of dollars.
Saving power is possibly one of the easiest ways to save some money on one of your bills each year. That being you Electric bill. Everything that you have plugged in an turned on at any time is going to be working towards making this bill bigger, and no body likes getting bills, so the more you can save the power at home or in your business the better off you are going to be.
The first step is to realize that you can save power almost everywhere without exception. Even on those appliances that you thought were a constant, like the fridge or freezer, or cordless phones. When it comes to the fridge or freezer, these are going to need to work harder the more that they are opened. This is because every time they are opened the cool air escapes, and the air that replaces this needs to be cooled so that things stay at the temperature they are supposed to. Of course you will need to get the odd thing through out the day out, but when you are cooking dinner or such plan what you are going to need our of the fridge and get it all at once, rather than going back and forth half a dozen times. When it comes to cordless phones, a single base station is the best option while they do need power, if you have 2 hand sets and two chargers always plugged in and charging you are using twice as much power as you need to, just charge one handset at a time and remember to swap the hand sets over.
The next step is changing your habits with lights, turning lights off when you leave a room even if for a short time of 5 to 10 minutes can be beneficial. While it may make a very small difference at the time, if you are conscious of how you use lights and can make small changes to your habits you will potentially find that when it comes time for your bill it has made a noticeable impact. Another thing you will find is quite beneficial to turn off when you are not using it is the TV, and computer’s (especially the monitor). If you are use to just having the TV on but not really watching it while you are doing other things you may like to try an alternative like the radio, or an MP3 player. Both will likely use considerably less power than a TV which could save you quite a bit at bill time. Computers are also another offender which can all count towards your power use. Make use of sleep or hibernate modes if the computer has them, or try to turn the computer off when you are not using is.
Making some small changes to the way that you do things and remembering to switch off lights and appliances when you are not using them is a big step towards bringing down that power bill, at least by a little bit, which over a year can add up.
Office Printing, Marketing Material, and any number of other printing requirements of a business can be a big cost for many businesses. When often it comes down to a fact that a large portion of these items are often disposed of or only kept for a short time. While to some extent there are some items that you cannot avoid putting to paper.
While you often know the difference when it comes to the things that you print out in your office, it can often be your marketing material though where it becomes a little more difficult. In your marketing material it can come down to a lot more then do you need it or not. When you are working with marketing material, there are many more factors to consider, such as what details a client will want to know or how many images is going to convey different points.
However you can make some large saving by removing information from your marketing material that is not essential and moving it to online electronic alternative. There are a number of ways that you can save by doing this.
- Save on Costs – We all know that printing marketing materials costs money. Often the costs in these materials, can become quite high if you have a lot of different information that you want to give to your customers. Only to find that most of the information for semi interested customers ends up in the bin. The less information you need to provide right away saves costs in printing.
- Save on Volume of Marketing Material to store – The other benefit from not including so much information in your marketing materials comes in how much space you need to store your pre-printed marketing materials. Depending on just where your office is located the space you are using to store marketing material could be reduced and space put to better use.
- Save on Postage – Another cost of sending bulky marketing material to customers is postage, the smaller the brochure the less you will be paying in postage. You would likely even see reduced postage costs if you just made a change from A4 to A5 size brochure’s without removing information and making it electronic, however a combination may save even more.
- Save time updating – Where you have a lot of time sensitive information such as pricing information or specifications which can change, you can make this information available electronically, and keep the timeless information in the brochure. Imagine if you had just had a brochure printed and 1 week later you get through multiple specification changes from the supplier, the new brochure is now useless and needs to be redone, where this could be avoided by keeping the information with potential to change in electronic form.
- Save on replacing catalogs so often – When it comes to pricing catalogs, it can be much more advantageous to maintain them in electronic format. Especially if you have a large number of products that have constantly changing prices. You find yourself stuck with the decision to reprint the catalog more often or list more prices as on request. Making your catalog electronic saves, all the costs of printing and means that you can make the latest version available to all customers a lot quicker.
As you can see there are a number of options which you can take advantage of to save money, time and also make it easier for your customers to keep up to date with the latest information. It can also help you to reduce the waste of having to dispose of a lot of out of date catalogs, brochures and other marketing material.
When you own or operate a business, it is quite often the case that you have employee’s. Having employee’s is a natural part of having a business for most owners, unless you are a owner/operator, who works alone. While there are many aspects of owning and operating a sustainable business that you do have control over, one of them you will often have little direct control over is the sustainability of your employee’s choice of travel to and from work.
There is however some ways that you can potentially overcome this being out of your control and look at ways to either make it easy for your employees to make better decisions on how they travel to work. To encourage more sustainable methods to be used. There are many different options available but lets take a look at a couple of the more common,
- Car Pooling - The bigger your business the more chance that some of the employees live in similar area’s. When this happens, there is potential for employee’s to car pool, and not just save money, but help the environment. The employee’s can save money by sharing the costs of getting to work. Additionally there can be a decent reduction in emissions. For example 3 employee’s who car pool could take it turn about to drive, and only pay the expenses of getting to work once every third week, or through mutual decision share the expenses. In doing so rather then driving 3 cars to get 3 people to work, now only one is being used, saving the additional emissions of 2 cars.
- Public Transport – Another alternative is to ensure your business is public transport friendly. In other words, especially if you have not located your business yet, look at the public transport options when finding an office or space to lease. Having rail and/or bus stations near by where you place your office, makes it easier for your employee’s to make use of these options to get to and from work. For every employee that uses public transport it takes one car off the road. While the emissions savings are not entirely the total of taking that car off the road, there can be significant emission savings if a larger portion of your employees make use of public transport.
- Company Cars – While many companies provide or at least make allowances available for some employee’s for a company car, consideration should be taken on what is the most environmentally conscious option. Where the company provides the car, choosing eco friendly models should be a part of the decision on which models to use. Where an allowance is made available to employee’s it may be worth considering additional incentives to choose environmentally friendly models.
While there is really at the moment, no real cost effective options, if any options at all. Which will allow the employee to leave little if no emissions footprint, in their commute to work. It could be a potential positive to encourage your employees to consider the different options.