Friday’s here, earth-buds! A hearty hip-hip-hooray for all things autumn, cause that means football season is in full swing and your humble blogger is a bit of a football nut, so I’ll see ya’ll in February. Nah, you can’t get rid of me that easy……..
Earlier this week the Green Dandelion offered some tips on making your office at home or school more environmentally friendly. I’d like to share with you some of the things I personally do to conserve resources. My ‘real’ job here at UR is providing training and development for our facilities staff. I also speak and make presentations at conferences and colleges nationwide. I love what I do and wouldn’t trade it for anything; but like all employees who have performed a job for a long time I got complacent in how I presented my material. I kept up on my presentation skills but I stopped thinking about the amount of paper I would distribute, lighting and overusing A/V equipment and controlling room temperatures. Well, I got a wake up call when our economy dived two years ago. I made a commitment to do things differently. Small changes, but they all add up in saving natural resources as well as money for my institution.
My biggest change was I stopped automatically providing handouts of presentations I was conducting. For staff who have computers, I email the presentation. For staff without computer access, I email their supervisors and also will provide a limited amount of handouts (maybe 3 copies for every 30 people, then will copy and mail one on request). In one year I saved almost 3,500 sheets of paper for three of my customer groups! Trainers go through a lot of “Hello, my name is..” badges and cardboard name tents. We eliminated the badges and have now purchased re-usable name tents. They are mini white boards that can be wiped clean easily after each use. Instead of purchasing over 400 name tents per year, I now have 30 re-usable ones. These name tents will pay for themselves in less than a year and saving a few trees immediately. In our Learning and Development Center we have the ability to increase/decrease lighting and we can also manipulate the temperature in the room slightly so our staff are comfortable when learning.
I was challanged to change the status quo of how I conduct business. I had to think differently and ask questions and talk to peers and customers on how I can improve my service to them. When we win, we win together. Have a great weekend. I know I will. There’s about 10 football games I want to see 🙂
Your ideas are terrific and easy to implement. I especially like the idea of the re-useable name tents. Thanks for sharing!