Apart from becoming more attractive for generation Y and saving the planet, you can actually cut your maintenance costs by going greener. An environment friendly business means lower electricity costs and lower equipment costs. Moreover, your employees are going to thank you – according to studies, employees working in green companies reported fewer sick days on average.[1] Other studies link an increase in productivity to environmentally friendly organizations.[2] With this in mind, here are some of the ways you can make your online business even more green than it already is.
1. Use green servers
Web hosting is one of the sources of pollution, as servers are responsible for 2% of the global green house emissions.((the Guardian: How viral cat videos are warming the planet) This means that when you have a site you are contributing to the pollution. Luckily, there are ways to counteract this: go for a green web server. Apart from reducing the carbon footprint, these servers have a couple of benefits. First, you can opt for a dedicated server, which is able to run with a large amount of data. Second, these servers run on renewable energy, which means they are not affected by power shortages. As for their performance level, they are just as powerful as traditional servers.
2. Hire remote workers
Having office space is costly and promotes pollution from multiple points of view. If you really want to make a difference, go remote. This means operating the entire business from home and using project management tools to keep track of work. Apart from not having to pay rent and bills for an office, your employees don’t have to spend on transportation, which can also come as a benefit for you when you have to make their payments.
3. Keep the meetings live
When you are working remotely you will have to conduct physical meetings from time to time, but you can keep most of the meetings live. Use Webinar, Skype and live streaming tools to conduct webinars and meetings. You are going to save lots of time and money as well as simplify the workflow. Once you’ve conducted an online training or meeting, it can be recorded and you can reuse it when you need to. This makes training new employees easier and it cuts the costs of actually having to meet and train the new people. And there is another benefit to live streaming and webinars: you can keep in touch with your customers without having to set up a store or an office. One of the most important lessons online businesses can take away from offline businesses is keeping in touch with customers. Skype and live streaming apps enable you to do this in a more environment friendly way and provides a highly effective marketing tool.
4. Cut the paper
Another great way to ensure your online business is green is to cut the paper consumption. Depending on how adventurous you are, you can digitize your work (almost) completely. Before you attempt this, you have to implement strong security policies to make sure your important documents will be safe; then you can start quitting the paperwork. The most paper consuming department of any business is the financial one, but there are plenty of tools and software you can use to keep track of receipts and reports, implementing a digital system. Your employees are going to rejoice at the thought of not having to manage hundreds of papers and their productivity will increase. As you can see, going green is definitely beneficial for both the environment and the company, so there are virtually no reasons to ignore this new trend. Especially because in the future it will become mandatory to operate a green organization. Featured photo credit: BusinessInsider via google.ro
