4 Ways to Make Every Day Earth Day with The Anywhere Office

While we have been preaching the environmental benefits of telecommuting and virtual teams for many, many years -today being Earth Day seemed like a good time to give you a quick rundown of some ways that the tools and strategies of The Anywhere Office® can help you go green and make every day Earth Day.

Here are 4 things you can easily do starting today to make a difference:

Eliminate or reduce the daily commute

Do you or your employees commute daily to a central office?  Consider telecommuting even a few days a week or month.  This can reduce tons of CO2 emissions annually.  Just how much?  Check out the carbon calculator at http://www.thegreenoffice.com/carboncalculator/calculator/.

SunMicrosystems Open Work program saved million in real estate and energy costs and cut carbon emissions by 29,000 tons in 2007.

If you need to access computers or documents in the office you can use a remote access service like GoToMyPC for easy remote access.

Or take a bold leap forward and go completely virtual by allowing your team or organization to work full time from their home offices.

A green home office

Already working from a home office? Great you’re already cutting down on your commute and carbon emissions – but you can do more. Our good friend and colleague Jeff Zbar, the “Chief Home Officer “, has written an excellent document for download on his site –  102 Tips to an Eco-Friendly Home Office. He shares some easy steps anyone can take to create an environmentally compatible home office.

Cut down on business trips for meetings, sales presentations, and training

Use a web conferencing service like GoToMeeting to collaborate and present in real-time. These affordable services make it easy to conduct on-the-fly or scheduled presentations with a prospective customer, perform live demonstrations in real time, collaborate on documents with your colleagues and provide training to customers and employees

If you are looking to hold larger meetings or online events consider GoToWebinar which supports up to 1,000 attendees per event.

Save paper and forests by working with document electronically

The production of paper sucks up trees, chemicals, energy (greenhouse gases) and water. About one third of the garbage we throw away is paper.  You can develop work practices that use less paper while also improving your productivity.  The Natural Strategies Group has some great suggestions that fit in with our anywhere office strategies. The main one is to work on, save, publish & distribute documents in electronic format and define clear (and tight) criteria for when you print. By limiting the times you can print you will have to develop your electronic work habits (editing on screen, online collaboration, taking meeting notes on laptop, etc).

An excellent tool for this is Central Desktop which allows you to create online workspaces to share files and documents, manage task lists and engage in group discussions.

You can also replace your traditional fax machine with an email based fax service like eFax.  This service allows you to send and receive faxes via email.  You will be saving time, electricity, and paper being that you won’t have to print documents out to fax them and you can forward the incoming digital fax to anyone without having to make copies.

Do something good for the earth and yourself

The beauty of the The Anywhere Office® approach is that while all of these tools and strategies help the environment – they will also help your business be more cost-effective and increase your productivity.

So this Earth Day  – do something more than reflect on the importance of the environment – make a commitment to adjusting how you work.

Post a comment below and let us know how you are making your business more green.