Two years ago, the number of businesses that promoted home or flexible working was low. Who knew it would take a global pandemic to make business fast-track to enable employees to work at home?
Remote work benefits businesses and workers, but have you considered sustainability?
Here are some ways a flexible work schedule can help your business achieve a more sustainable operation.
Reduce your office space and your running costs
More employees working from home will mean your office space will go to waste. Not everyone will want to work from home every day, but that doesn’t mean you need to keep ample office space.
Moving to a smaller office space has benefits. You’ll have less need for individual offices, allowing greater transparency and better collaboration for your business.
This leads to reduced running costs and energy use, helping your business operate much more sustainably as one of the changes you can make to your business right now. Moving to a smaller office could save your business money while making it greener.
Take advantage of opportunities to outsource
A growing business typically takes on more employees to help cope with demand and an expansion of services. This leads to increased costs for your business thanks to paying salaries and benefits, purchasing equipment, etc. But if your business embraces more remote work, you could get the opportunity to outsource instead.
Outsourcing areas like IT, live call answering services, and sales and marketing could all help keep your business’s headcount low, helping your business run more efficiently.
Drastically reduce office waste
It’s expected that having many people in a building will produce much waste. From food waste to lunch packaging and more, offices produce tons of waste yearly – even with recycling processes. With your employees at home or working elsewhere, they will be responsible for their waste. To help, you could advise employees on effective waste practices. Using these products might help them become more energy-efficient at home.
Cut down on business travel
Travel is typically a considerable expense for businesses. During the pandemic, travel has been limited, forcing businesses to think differently about meetings, events, and conferences. Video calling and collaboration tools reduce costs and emissions.
If you’re concerned that a video call can’t fully replace a face-to-face meeting, it might be time to switch things up. Take a look at some ways you can make video meetings better. Get creative to make them a more effective substitute for physical meetings.
Less time in the office, less paper
Having fewer people in the office can mean your office uses less paper. A paperless office is more achievable than ever, and as your employees will unlikely want to fill their own homes with paper, you can make it happen.
To enable paperless working, you’ll need to ensure you have the proper cloud storage in place and ensure all of your systems are secure to prevent cybersecurity breaches. This can require some initial investment, but it’s a price worth paying to go paperless and make your data more secure.
Cut your employees’ carbon footprint
One of the things that people don’t miss about working from home is commuting time. And the environment doesn’t miss the commute either. Having your employees work from home will mean less need for them to travel by car. Do you operate a business fleet? If so, you could invest in electric or hybrid cars when employees need to get around.
Remote work presents several challenges, but it’s hard to deny the benefits. If you’re looking for ways to improve work/life balance, reduce running costs, and do more for the environment, remote work could be your business’s solution. Think about how your business can be more sustainable due to home working and see the benefits it can bring.
