When you are learning to enhance your workplace productivity, team cohesiveness becomes pivotal. There’s lots of talk about the culture of a company in terms of its ethics and attitudes, and the one thing we can’t get away from in this day and age is sustainability. It should be hardwired into our culture and ethics, but small businesses can often find themselves struggling under the weight of their stature. Small practices are an excellent way to promote sustainability efforts. Here are a few simple and effective ways to do this.
Leverage the Best Working Relationships
Working with the right people who understand what you’re about and vice versa can make a massive difference, and it can be in so many different industries and practices that you may very well have neglected. An article called “The Environmental Benefits of Using Print Management Solutions” highlights just how print management solutions can be an effective tool within any business. There is no small endeavor when it comes to business sustainability, and relationships are always going to underpin everything you do and will reflect most effectively on your organisation. Leveraging working relationships, either in terms of your supply chain or your stakeholders, can all work towards a culture of sustainability to empower your team.
Setting Clear Sustainability Goals
The big problem with cultural talk in an organisation is that it can all descend into wishy-washy territory. This is why you need to surround it with solid goals and take concrete steps to upgrade to things like energy-efficient lighting and equipment. But when you set clear sustainability goals using the SMART framework (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound), this provides a solid roadmap for your efforts, and you can track your progress. So many businesses set goals that are either unattainable or not focused enough. This framework is always very useful to ensure that you are able to hit your mark.
Communicating Your Sustainability Efforts
We should always learn how best to highlight ourselves in terms of those all-important ethics. You can do it in your marketing, product labeling, and engagement with customers, but you also need to remember that when you are communicating these, you shouldn’t be hitting people over the head with what you are doing, and in something like sustainability, it’s easy to put across a holier-than-thou perspective. It’s always about recognising where your brand reputation is best served. For example, attracting environmentally conscious consumers is an excellent way to ensure that you are promoting sustainability in the right ways.
Conduct an Audit
This is one small effort that can take a long period of time to get right. You can assess your current environmental impact by analysing your energy consumption, waste generation, and supply chain practices so you can identify areas for improvement. Small businesses can benefit from doing one thing at a time here. When you conduct an environmental audit, you can see what is truly working well for your business, which you can double down on, and of course, those things that aren’t working so well, you have a far better understanding of what needs to be changed. It doesn’t happen overnight; however, small practices can soon add up.