News

Giving your company the green light

Climate change, carbon neutral, and emissions offsetting – terms that are really quite hard to escape these days. They seem to infiltrate every aspect of our lives, from celebrity gossip to chat shows to the pages of newspapers and box-office hits. However, while it might seem like just the latest media buzz-word, going green is not the new ‘Millennium Bug’.  When Sir Nicholas Stern, published his authoritative report on climate change, he described it as the "greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen".

But if all the media madness around giving back to the community isn’t pricking your corporate conscience, you might be interested to find that going green is far from just a social issue – it makes good business sense too. Reducing your energy usage and paper wastage of course offers a significant cost saving to your business, but green businesses are also ahead in terms of winning new contracts and attracting talented staff.

We conducted a survey recently, which found that 57% of jobseekers want to work for ethical employers. When we asked business leaders what they thought, 83% wanted to work with socially responsible partners.

Adopting green policies is clearly a positive step for any business, and surprisingly, it isn’t very difficult as difficult as you would think. At Reed Specialist Recruitment, when we made the decision to go green in June 2006, we teamed up with a Carbon Neutral Company, and were amazed to find out how simple changes to our every day working practices could have a real environmental impact.

These are some of our tips on how to reduce and offset emissions:

• 100% use of ‘green energy’, all energy used in the office is supplied by renewable, sustainable sources

• Changes to company internal document production, all internal documents are printed double sided only

• Many more client services are available online and temporary staff now complete timesheets through the internet

• Paper recycling facilities in every Reed Employment office

• Use of paper sourced from sustainable forests and biodegradable vegetable oil ink on Reed Employment literature

• Reducing the amount of printing and mailing material in favour of email where possible

• Where possible clients are visited on foot or public transport, reducing the mileage & carbon output

• Temporary staff are encouraged to use public transport and think about their activities at home and work

• The introduction of the supply of web and teleconferencing equipment to senior managers to reduce the need to travel to meetings

• An updated internal IT system means that all PCs can now be switched off overnight, using 95% less energy per week, saving approximately 3.8million kilowatt hours per year throughout the company.