If your company’s New Year’s resolution is to renovate its offices, why not turn over a new leaf quite literally by making sure your office is environmentally friendly. A green office presents many benefits, from cost savings to better productivity, but most of all it shows that your company is willing to do its part to conserve the environment.
If you’ve yet to make any solid plans, you’ll be happy to know that there are a great many renovations you can make to decrease the size of your company’s carbon footprint. And, with a blank slate, you’re in the perfect position to make the most of them.
At Virtus Contracts we’re absolutely bursting with ideas. But, since we don’t want to overwhelm you, here are a few tips for installing a green office to whet your appetite for conservation.
Tips for Making Your Office Green
Make the Office Green
We mean this in the literal sense (and we’re not referring to a coat of paint). One of the best ways make your office green is by bringing in a lot of plants.Plants have a significant positive impact on many aspects of the office. The splendour of a lush office, for example, helps with employee morale and decreases feelings of stress and anxiety. Plants also help staff attendance as they promote workplace health through the creation of fresh oxygen and the elimination of minor air pollution.
Use Multifunction Equipment
Office equipment like scanners, copiers, printers, and fax machines take up a lot of space and can draw copious amounts of power. In addition, their manufacturing and disposal can draw even more energy and create a great deal of harmful products. So, it’s far kinder to the environment to limit the amount of equipment you have in your office. This is easily done through the use of multifunction machines, which combine all of the above functions into one machine.
Buy Power-Saving Lights
Simply put, fluorescent and LED bulbs draw far less energy than ordinary incandescent light bulbs. This means less energy usage and less frequent disposal. This saves you money and helps conserve the environment – such a great reward for such a simple change.
Consider Motion Sensors
Do all the lights stay on indefinitely in your office? If they do, asking employees to turn off the lights as they leave rooms might not help much. However, installing motion sensors will definitely solve the problem. These sense movement in a room and, if no one is occupying it, they turn off the lights.
Reduce your office stationary carbon footprint
If you have a lot of promotional materials such as leaflets or brochures printed consider using a printing company that is carbon neutral. The print industry is one of the most polluting in the UK and until we’re living in a truly paperless world, every little can help.
Plan to Maximise Natural Light
If you are in a position where you can completely redesign your office, you have a fantastic opportunity to maximise your office’s natural light. Natural light not only curbs your office’s energy consumption but it improves the vitality of your employees.
Going Green Is Win-Win
It’s rare to find an alternate way of operating that saves money, improves productivity, and does a world of good, but going green is one of these rarities. With so much to gain from such little effort, going green is definitely a win-win situation.
So, to get the jump on a green office in the New Year, contact Virtus Contracts today!
