The environmental sustainability of office spaces is a topic that has recently taken great precedence in the global market in recent years. In reducing your office environmental footprint, your business can reap the benefits of green-star ratings, word of mouth marketing from your ethical focus, and simply having a company with a healthier moral conscience. There are many steps any office can take to actively reduce their footprint, with varying degrees of success in implementation. Below are some of the more effective methods that can be applied in most office spaces, to actively reduce your carbon footprint.

Employee education

At the end of the day, the success of your office’s sustainability approaches rests solely on the actions of your employees. This is why one of the first steps you should take is to invest in employee education. Making your employees aware of the initiatives you plan to implement – as well as the steps they personally can take – can help boost the success of your office’s sustainability plan. More and more, employees are gaining respect for companies that take the initiative to improve their environmental footprint. Education can be done internally, or through the use of external educators, to ensure that your employees have the right tools in their toolbox to begin to implement your greener initiatives.

Greenify your office

The most important step in reducing your carbon footprint is to take the active step to permanently create an office space which holds environmental sustainability at the forefront of its purpose. This can be done through a number of simple changes, that will dramatically reduce the footprint of your space:

• Something as simple as changing your lightbulbs to more energy efficient alternatives can serve to drastically reduce your office’s footprint. According to CHOICE,  despite their higher initial price, LED and CFL light bulbs pay for themselves quickly through their much lower running costs.
• Make recycling bins more readily accessible, to encourage recycling around your entire space and discourage or eliminate the use of unnecessary printing or single use plastics.
• Set your computers and monitors to more energy efficient modes, so that they burn less electricity when in use (and when idle).

As you can see, there are many simple changes you can make to improve the sustainability of your space, and chatting to an external office fitout specialist will help unlock the various initiatives and ideas that can bring your office to the forefront of modern sustainability.

Always be measuring your office environmental footprint

The best and most sustainable offices aren’t the ones that just implement their initiatives and let them take their course. The best sustainable offices are the ones always looking to innovate and improve on their current carbon footprint. By always measuring the impact of your office – and the effect of your sustainability measures –  you will easily be able to understand which initiatives have proven fruitful, and which need more work. Through measurement you can consistently uphold a solid sustainability score, and reap all of the benefits that come with it.