How Online Collaboration Can Help Business and the Environment

Even if the grubby money hungry hounds in corporate don’t believe climate change is real, taking positive action can be extremely profitable – to the planet and your business. In this article, I’m going to talk about how building a corporate structure around sustainability can be lucrative, because when going green puts more green in wallets they’ll listen to the science. From utilising online collaboration tools to downscaling on office space and reducing costs, here are some of the ways businesses can prosper from greenification.

Carbon emissions are costing you

Project management software and collaboration tools allow team members to work from anywhere. This means that employees can work from home and cut the commute from the daily grind, while still working effectively as a team. One TIME article estimated that the average cost of petrol used to regularly commute to work came to roughly £40,000 every ten years. And wouldn’t you rather invest that money in, say, your child’s education or, better still, your retirement? When it comes to the environment, burning through a litre of petrol equates to 2.31kg of CO2 emissions. About 15% of airborne pollution can be equated to car use worldwide.

You can invite clients to use your cloud service to be kept up to date on project milestones without arranging a special meeting which might otherwise call for overseas travel. Flying is the most environmentally costly mode of transport. In the UK, flying is responsible for somewhere between 13% and 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Flying is also very costly; that’s because even low-cost flights present many hidden costs, and airport prices are often high.

Paper is your middle man, and you don’t need one of those

When all work is being completed over the cloud, you can clear the paper off your shelves; other than the occasional post-it, you don’t need it. Paper production is costly to the planet, and it doesn’t end with when trees are cut down. Paper mills emit huge amounts of toxins into the air, while air and land freight add to the fossil fuels that the industry generates.

Not using paper is a big cost saver. Besides cutting down on reams of the stuff, industrial-grade office printers can be sent back to the manufacturer, while the space that stationary products occupy can be reclaimed. Businesses can, as a result, rent smaller spaces, or as suggested earlier, cut the office out of the equation altogether.

The suits upstairs will be on board once they see that reducing your carbon footprint has also significantly cut down on costs. Use team collaboration software to switch to a cloud-based system that helps you streamline projects, cut back on frivolous spending, and save the planet one paper ream at a time.