When you are working in an office or even better yet, running an office, there are lots of things that you have to be concerned about. One of the things that you need to be thinking about within an office is ensuring that all of your staff are happy and safe in the working environment.
When you’re talking about your staff being safe you’re not just talking about ensuring that they not hurting themselves in the office with a rogue stapler or a paper cut. No, you’re talking about the safety of your employees in terms of their mental health and their happiness at work. This means that when your employees are happy while they’re working, they are going to be as productive as possible in their day-to-day performance.
There are many ways to ensure that your employees are happy at work. One of the ways that you can make sure that your employees are pleased in their workplace is by being as environmentally conscious as possible, as lots of people now are placing high importance of the ‘greenness’ or environmental conscious of their employer. If you are working in a culture where printing is actively encouraged and where you aren’t recycling, you may find even that employees become sad within the workplace, as their values aren’t being met!
When you are looking to encourage employee productivity it’s vital to ensure that you are thinking about everyone’s input. Steps that you can take to ensure that you are doing the right thing with the new workplace include the following:
Step One.
If it’s at all possible, encourage the use of emails with in the workplace as this cuts down a huge amount on paper usage in the office, and also ensures that people are spending less time getting up and down from their desks! This also has the added effect of possibly increasing productivity within the workplace – and that’s a bonus if there ever was one!
Step Two.
Within the workplace, try to ensure that when you are changing over the printer cartridges that you are using the most efficient printer cartridges possible for your printer. Also, if you can – figure out the best possible way to recycle your printer cartridges and stick to it.
Step Three.
Within your office encourage employee interaction with your recycling and green initiatives by implementing a roster that allows employees to do the recycling, change the printer cartridges, and even buy new supplies online! This will foster a positive environment of community within your workplace, and this will, in turn, contribute to an overall increased feeling of goodwill.
Step Four.
A great idea to not only create a sense of community but to aid your cause is to hold regular meetings with your employees to find out how they think that you could improve your workplace and its green initiatives. By getting their input, you will be increasing the potential that you will create the best possible system!
Step Five.
Make sure you keep it up, and a great way to do this is to create a system of rewarding employees for taking the initiative to go above and beyond your system. By doing this you have the potential to gamify the whole office which may in turn lead to better improvements and will certainly lead to better feeling as employees are rewarded for their involvement in and commitment to the initiatives.
You’re on the right track with this – and if more and more offices took the time and initiative to come up with an environmental care plan, we would see a big improvement in the overall feeling of goodwill among people and a huge lessening of strain on the planet.
