When we think of climate change, we don’t usually think about corporate IT or the externality costs associated with video calls or heavy email attachments. Digital technology has a serious—and increasing—impact on our environment, with a carbon footprint of about 4% of global carbon emission (that’s more than the aviation industry’s 2.5% contribution).
Outside of our digital work lives, I think we’ve grown accustomed to sustainable practices. Many of us know the three R’s and try to apply them in our daily routines: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. But there is a fourth R-word to keep in mind: Rethink.
When it comes to our behavior at work, we’re less conscious of our environmental impact. We need to Rethink certain work habits that can be exchanged for greener, more efficient practices, without sacrificing the employee experience and productivity.
Here’s how IT can influence employees and make a difference.
1) Establish an e-waste policy
Take the lead and document your corporate e-waste policy on how to properly dispose of and donate old equipment. Once it is written down, publicize your policy internally with best practices. Invite employees to bring their old unwanted devices from home to a company-sponsored local e-waste collection day.
E-waste is the fastest growing waste stream. The world generated 53.6 million metric tons (MMT) of e-waste, or about 7.3 kilograms (~16 pounds) per person in 2019; equivalent in weight to 350 cruise ships. With an estimated 2.5 MMT accumulated every year, e-waste is expected to reach 74.7 MMT by 2030.
2) Implement cost-effective hardware refresh plans
Update your hardware refresh plans to be more cost-effective and be less vulnerable to the current chip shortage challenges. Extend device lifecycles and refresh hardware only when needed based on the employee’s need and device performance, not time-based manufacturer recommendations. Extending the device lifecycle results in significant cost savings and reducing environmental impact.
3) Educate employees
Send targeted campaigns based on employees’ digital experience to convey environmental facts to drive changes in employee behavior.
Here are some simple tips to share with employees to lower their carbon footprint:
- Here’s a sample from an internal Green-IT quiz created to educate and engage employees about changing behavior by deleting unused emails.
- [Listen to this panel of IT experts speaking about engaging employees in a hybrid world and how they’ve implemented smart Green IT user habits]Remind employees to turn off their PCs at the end of the day. “Imagine that you had left your laptop on standby for three weekends in a row. Now imagine a friendly, unobtrusive pop-up that didn’t simply inform you of this but also pointed to what the impact of that might mean to the environment and your own professional carbon footprint…”
- Guide employees to select a balanced power plan to optimize battery life and performance by adopting a more balanced approach based on their work habits. In addition to powering down devices when they aren’t in use, suggest employees explore additional modifications to establish power settings by adopting sleep mode or hibernate settings to save energy during inactivity.
- Think before you print, if at all! Do you remember the focus to reduce paper and printing email years ago? A customer emailed me a few weeks ago and their signature block included: ‘Please consider the environment before printing this email.’ This reminded me of how successful this message was to change behavior to print less.
- Suggest employees adopt an eco-friendly browser like Ecosia. Ecosia’s free browser extension generates income from search ads to fund climate action projects including planting trees around the world. Just another way to give back to the environment while you browse. Benefits increase if you click on ads during your Ecosia browser sessions!
- Encourage employees to send fewer emails with attachments. Urge them to utilize OneDrive to not only gain efficiencies during review and edit cycles and enhance collaboration among teams, using OneDrive significantly reduces the number of copies of the same document stored locally and on servers, which helps lower storage requirements and reduce digital waste.
4) Create internal goals
Tie your sustainable IT initiatives to larger corporate social and sustainability goals. Link personal achievement and changes to bigger environmental benefits and goals across your organization.
Create an Earth Day challenge every year in April to spark excitement and action. Invite and encourage employees to create teams for some friendly competition to boost awareness. The prize can be bragging rights for being environmentally conscious.
5) Combine forces with your CSR team and ESG strategy
If your Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Environmental Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) teams aren’t talking with you, start the conversation with them! Share your ideas and plans to educate and engage employees to reduce consumption. This is another proactive approach to get ahead of problems to adapt and drive change to lower business costs and impact.
They aren’t technology experts; they need IT to help them reach employees to reduce your company’s carbon footprint to meet near-term and future sustainability goals.
Plain and simple IT is the only entity that can truly drive smart technology changes with employees.
Kick-off your Sustainable IT initiatives today with Nexthink’s Green IT solution
