There is an increasing awareness among businesses, to operate in environment-friendly ways. Unfortunately, this awareness tends to wane a few days after events like Earth Day (April 22) and World Environment Day (June 5). Going green becomes more of an event than a lifestyle. Here are some reasons why going green by adopting eco-friendly practices in our daily work life makes great business sense:

• Cost and time savings: By making your business processes green, you can actually reduce costs, speed up work and help your employees achieve process goals quicker. This is best done by converting your existing paper based documents into digital formats and creating new documents in digital formats only. Documents in electronic formats can be automatically routed for review, approval etc. They can be edited and managed much more easily than paper based documents, saving time. It also reduces your need for office supplies like paper, cartridges, pins and clips etc. This helps you cut costs too.
• More efficient operations: Paperless methods of managing documents and processes help reduce your employees’ workload. They can process more work in the given amount of time, thereby increasing productivity. With all the files that they need to refer to being at their fingertips, it makes document based processes more efficient.
• Improves customer satisfaction: Information that is stored in digital documents can be retrieved within seconds. When your customers promptly get the information they want, it enhances their experience and improves your reputation. With more efficient information management systems, your firm will be in a position to respond to market changes quickly too.
• Helps with compliance: Digitizing your documents – both archives and current documents – lets you organize them in search-friendlier ways than organizing paper based documents. So if a government agency asks for certain documents that are years old, you can easily locate them if you have retained them in your archive. If you implement an enterprise document management system, you will be able to store and manage your documents securely. This will help you comply with the local and international laws that are applicable to your organization.
• ‘Green’ culture: As your employees learn new, more efficient ways of working, they could extend this green work culture to their personal lives too. And it’s not only about digitizing documents by using document management software. There are various green initiatives you can take that will present your organization in favorable light.

You can also enjoy reading a couple of our past blog posts that cover this topic:

• Make every day your Paper Free Day, with Globodox!
• How to reduce your organization’s carbon footprint

What are some of the eco-friendly business practices used by your firm? Share your thoughts with us!