Green Office Blog

The first One Planet Living principle we will be exploring is health and happiness.  When thinking of the word “sustainability”, one doesn’t normally think about what we dish up on our dinner plates, or our wellbeing for that matter.  The reality is however, that a happy and healthy community is a sustainable one, and it’s no different with respect to happy and healthy employees contributing to a business’ sustainability.  This tends to be overlooked by employers, yet it is arguably one of the most important aspects to keeping customers happy – vital to any business’s success.  Consider the following benefits of ensuring that your employees are happy and healthy

How do you turn your business into a paperless environment? Is it as simple as stopping all printing and just doing everything digitally? What about storing and retrieving documents? The list of questions can get really long!

To address this challenge, Green Office’s Business Process Optimisation focuses on the following three steps:

Cost savings, greater efficiencies and sustainability are all synonymous with the South African market.  Most businesses are driving towards a leaner business that operates more efficiently while driving down operating costs.  Printing and its associated costs are no different.

In a modern-day business environment, these are some of the important steps on how one can effectively reduce the amount of spend within their printing environment.

Having a print management software to recover matter billing from your clients is no longer a pleasant option, but rather an essential part of your law firm’s IT toolkit.  However, although most firms recognise this need and the importance of this revenue stream, most aren’t sure what the best software is and how to go about it.

Let’s fix that.

As our business explores the concept and principles of One Planet Living, it is important to understand the science behind the strategy – ecological footprint.  Ecological footprint is the only metric that measures the demand we put on nature, and what nature can give us in return.  In other words, it measures how fast we consume resources and generate waste in comparison to how fast nature can absorb our waste and generate new resources for us to use. 

The office environment and the use of technology within, is rapidly changing and advancing year on year, and businesses are continually pressured to reduce operational costs, improve service levels and offer more products at a competitive rate.  

This has resulted in a high demand for Business Solution Providers that can offer holistic office solutions and expertise in all operational areas of businesses and can assist with making them operationally efficient and sustainable.

I asked my son, who is in Grade 9, which medium at school he prefers to read and study from.  Without hesitation he said a book or on paper.  His first reason was clear, he feels less distracted when reading from a book, while an e-book or screen always remains a temptation.  

The accessibility to games and social media is real and one can’t help but be distracted even if on some subconscious level.  His second reason was less clear, but in summary, he prefers the hands-on physical side of turning pages and having ease of reference when using a book to study.

The human population’s appetite for relentlessly eating away at the Earth’s natural riches and resources is growing out of control. 

A report produced by the International Resource Panel, a component of the United Nations Environment Programme, indicated that rising consumption has resulted in resource extraction increasing from 22 billion tons in 1970 to 70 billion tons in 2010.   This means that the amount of the planet’s natural resources extracted for human use has tripled in the last 40 years.   The report warns that further increases in the use of natural resources will result in critical shortages of materials and an increase in the risk of human conflict.

‘Going green’, ‘eco-friendly’ and ‘sustainability’ are all buzz words in businesses these days.  We take advantage of daily conveniences, without always considering the impact it has on the Earth’s resources.  Since inception, Green Office has prided itself in prioritising the environment.

Think twice before opting for bartered sponsorship deals for your school with Office Automation companies. 

These days there appears to be a trend with Office Automation companies offering sponsorship to schools in order to obtain their business, the question and concern this raises with me is “Who is actually paying for the sponsorship, the Office Automation Company or the School?”