Greener working can save millions
Communications technology can help organisations introduce greener, more productive working practices and save millions in the process.
When O2 moved to new headquarters earlier this year it put in place a greener working programme with impressive results: £3.84m saved in hot-desking alone; 100% of flexible workers report better work-life balance; absenteeism down; and a 53% reduction in head office CO2 emissions.
Forum has been helping O2 develop and implement its sustainability strategy for the last few years so they invited me to open this webinar on how to use communications technology to enable greener working. I was asked why the agenda should be important to organisations. The basic answer: you can save money while getting ready for a carbon-constrained future.
You can watch the webinar to find out more about the technology O2 used to achieve its results and, crucially, the way they involved people in creating the new social practices around how to use that technology well.
My opening is much more about the scale and urgency of the challenge of climate change. The Sustainable Development Commission's Prosperity without Growth illustrates the scale: we will need to get 130 times more economic value for every gram of CO2 emitted by 2050. The Met Office's report on Informing Choices gives the urgency: to have a 50% chance of avoiding 2 degrees of warming we must have peak global emissions by 2020, with 5% reductions each year thereafter.
Greener working will never be the full answer. But it is a start that most organisations can make that does have financial returns now. An astute business person can use it to start exploring the opportunity for their business to profit from moving to a carbon-constrained world.
Comments
Growth is seen as the key driver for prosperity, development, fairness and wealth creation. All modern economies rely on growth which builds in debt, unemployment and inequality in order to function in a capitalist framework. It is the business imperitive (profit and increasing short-term shareholder value) that gides management decision and dampens longer term thinking.
In commecial thinking it's not possible to separate environmental decisions from economic ones. Most managers have been trained to protect the bottom line no matter what. Environmental impacts of decisions may not be immediate and are worth the risk long-term (BP excluded) So unfortunately we cannot find reverse and the innovative carbon civilisation will have a similar fate to all others before it - Although the Romans and the bronze age eras fared a bit better if you look at how long they lasted - Oh well at least from these earlier civilaisation we still have money!
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