Make Your Office Eco-Friendlier with These Five Tips
At Office H2O, we believe in putting in the work to live an eco-friendlier lifestyle, reducing carbon emissions and helping to protect the planet. In fact, that’s one of our main goals as a company! For this reason, we encourage everyone to do their best to make their office eco-friendlier. Not only does an eco-friendly office help the environment, but it’s also surprisingly good for your bottom line. Fortunately, there are a variety of ways to incorporate eco-friendly practices in an office environment that can also reduce your expenses. Today, we’ll be sharing five tips to help you make your office eco-friendlier. Let’s get started!
The Benefits of an Eco-Friendly Office
Before we get to the five tips we have to offer to make your office eco-friendlier, it’s important that you know the benefits of having an eco-friendly office. A truly eco-friendly office reflects a workspace that aims to reduce its overall environmental impact – with the entire staff being well aware of their responsibility. Taking the necessary actions to make your office eco-friendlier, however, comes with many benefits that you might not expect.
For one, an eco-friendly office can have a positive effect on your staff in terms of productivity. According to a recent study, green offices produce a 26% boost in cognition as well as increasing the overall productivity of workers by a total of 15%. That same study also found that there were measurable improvements amongst the staff in eco-friendly offices in terms of strategy, crisis response, and information usage. On a holistic level, an eco-friendly office promotes a healthy and fresh work environment.
An eco-friendly office also reduces costs. By using less energy and water, going green in your office can have a huge impact on your monthly bills. Another way you can reduce costs is by using your resources more efficiently. One company, known as the Co-operative Group, has headquarters that were designed to use 80% less carbon than the company’s previous headquarters, as well as half of the energy. As a result, the company’s operation costs dropped by a third. This provides evidence that one of the greatest benefits of an eco-friendly office is found in costs. Now on to our five tips!
Get Your Staff Involved
In order to make introducing an eco-friendly focus to your office successful, it’s important that your staff is involved. After all, no matter how hard you work to make your office greener, your efforts will be for nothing if your staff doesn’t understand its importance! A great way to get your staff involved in the process is setting small, environmentally-friendly targets on either a weekly or monthly basis. It’s also a good idea to consider creating a sustainability team that can effectively manage and implement all green initiatives in your office space. This team could gather and discuss the various ways you can make your office greener. Most importantly, this sustainability team can help to empower the rest of your staff by giving them the right resources and training. When you get your staff involved and even excited about the process of making the office eco-friendlier, you’ll be more likely to experience the full benefits of a green office!
Reduce Energy Use
Another way to successfully make your office eco-friendlier involves reducing your energy use. While most people remember to turn off the lights and equipment upon leaving their homes, it’s a bit easier to forget to do so when leaving the office space. By doing your part to establish internal procedures and initiatives that promote conserving energy, you’re likely to save a substantial amount of money in the course of the year. Better yet, you’ll be doing your part to minimize the environmental footprint of your company!
Provide Recycling Bins
Once simple way to make your office eco-friendlier is by providing recycling bins for all that paper used in an office environment and then encouraging your employees to use those bins. While paper is one of the most commonly recycled items in an office, there are other opportunities to recycle in the form of cardboard boxes, for example.
Decorate with Plants
Believe it or not, a great way to make your office eco-friendlier involves bettering the air quality. Decorating your office with plants is one of the best ways to improve the air quality in your office space. Considering how much time is spent in the office on a daily basis, optimizing the air quality is imperative. Sure, there are indoor air purification systems that can help with this issue, but they tend to be costly. Plants are a great way to enhance the air that you and your staff breathe in the office on a regular basis.
Choose LED Lights
Finally, your choice of lighting in the office is another great way to make your office eco-friendlier. LED lights have been shown to significantly reduce the consumption of energy in an office. Some studies have even shown the reduction to be over 75% in total. Additionally, LED lights also tend to last a lot longer, meaning you won’t have to worry about purchasing and replacing light bulbs as often. This is a great way to make your office eco-friendlier!
Make Your Office Eco-Friendlier with Office H2O!
While we have included five tips that you can use to make your office eco-friendlier, there’s one more bonus tip that we have to offer you: a bottleless water system from Office H2O! At Office H2O, we know that by going bottleless in your office, you can reduce the amount of carbon emissions, making the planet greener while also saving yourself a lot of money!
We consider ourselves bottleless water experts who are dedicated to purifying today’s workplace with healthy, sustainable drinking water. When you purchase a bottleless water system for your office, you’ll be joining us in creating a healthier planet, one drop at a time. Browse our selection of bottleless water systems today to find the right system for your office and get started on the path to a greener, eco-friendlier office space!
Photo by Akil Mazumder from Pexels