13 Steps to "Green" Your Business

Matthew W. Costello

To save money and help the environment at the same time, follow the same methodical approach your business takes for any kind of internal corporate initiative.

Corporations around the world are are fast becoming environmentalists—whether they want to or not, whether they view themselves as environmentalists or not, whether they "believe in" climate change or not. The cost of gasoline, crude oil, electric power, natural gas, raw materials, garbage disposal, and water has never been higher, and corporations around the world are scrambling to find ways to control these core operating expenses.

Businesses and institutions that established environmental programs long ago to conserve natural resources are reaping the financial and environmental rewards as never before. Meanwhile, those businesses that are only now acting are regretting their slow movement. (No doubt, there is a third option remaining for businesses: they can keep doing nothing at all, and continue to view environmental concerns as a mere passing fad and climate change as a huge hoax.)

Why should your company or institution go "green" or accelerate its current internal green programs? The answer is simple: because of money. Corporate environmentalism is not just about some high-minded sense of ethics or some elevated sense of social responsibility. It’s not just about improved efficiency and wise use of natural resources. It’s not just about falling in line with current or pending regulations.

Instead, corporate environmentalism is about what good business and smart management have always been about – making money and keeping it.

Corporate environmentalism is about what good business and smart management have always been about—making money and keeping it.

Lean businesses are green businesses. Let’s consider the word "waste." As a noun, waste means "worthless," "discarded material." The verb "waste" means "to fail to use." By definition, waste is synonymous with inefficiency. Also consider the words "ecology" and "economy." These two words, not commonly viewed as compatible, come from the Greek word "oikos" or "eco," meaning "house" or "home." From Latin came the word "conservare." Conservationists aim to preserve what’s best on Earth, our home.

But, how does one go about greening a workplace and getting rid of inefficient waste? The key is not to get too bogged down in the jargon of the environmental community, and instead to focus on the businesslike, methodical approach your business takes to undergo any type of internal corporate initiative.

It doesn’t matter if you can’t tell the difference between a carbon footprint and a carbon credit, or if you aren’t entirely sure about the science or lack of science behind climate change. The key to greening your workplace is to follow your business instincts and strictly adhere to your own company’s tried-and-true ways for rolling out any type of change program within its operations.

Whether the project is a corporate-wide diversity initiative or a campaign to boost employee participation rates in the annual United Way Fund, all companies have their own in-house customs and styles for rolling out any type of change program. Typical steps include settling on a target, setting a clear goal, determining your metrics and benchmarks, assembling a well-rounded committee to shepherd the process, and so on.

These incremental steps from beginning to end are no different for an environmental project. Let’s take a closer look at how your company can save money and save natural resources with some lessons I’ve learned over 20 years as a consultant to municipalities, universities, and many of America’s leading corporations. By following a course of action that should be second nature to seasoned business executives, any business can roll out successful greening initiative.

You want to aim high, yet keep the goal within reason.

The first step is to agree on the project and justify its selection. The "Goal and Rationale," for example, might be "To cut copier and printer paper use by 10 percent by the end of 2009 in order to save money and help the environment." Or how about this water usage goal, a wise choice for any business in the southeastern United States that suffered through the severe regional drought of 2007: "To reduce the company’s overall water consumption by 40 percent during the summer months."

An energy conservation goal could be "To slash energy bills by 15 percent by this time next year" (although with electric and natural gas bills soaring, you might want to shorten the time frame to say "within one quarter").

Your project options are endless. Regardless of the goal you choose and the initial environmental project you undertake, the "rationale statement" should be crystal-clear, concise, and money-related. You also want to aim high, yet keep the goal within reason.

Whether you like them or dread them, committees provide the labor, perspective, and direction behind virtually all types of in-house, corporate-wide initiatives.

Each of us has served on good committees and bad committees; the best ones, you might agree, have a dynamic mix of energy and experience, a chairperson with a clear mission, and deadlines and timetables that are respected. The worst ones take on too many projects, have an aimless chairperson, and are composed of members who are nonrepresentative of the company as a whole.

For your environmental committee, you want an A-Team, or shall we say "E-Team," of your company’s best people representing the following divisions: a communicator skilled in employee training, a procurement specialist, a facilities person, an accountant to keep track of money earned and money spent, an administrative assistant who can speak for all the other support staff in the company, a senior executive who can get a quick answer from the CEO’s office whenever needed, and at least a few others who truly know the corporate culture and how to steer a project through the company maze.

They need not be so-called environ-mentalists; in fact, it is often good to go out of your way to recruit a skeptic or two to provide balance. At one major university where I worked, a staunch anti-environmentalist served on a high-ranking environmental
committee. He was routinely voted down 15 to 1, and many of his statements sounded like angry rants, but the role he played as a "devil’s advocate" often kept the committee grounded in reality—a crucially important thing when you are rolling out a company-wide project that will affect all employees.

Other committee members you might want to consider are your specialists in the facilities division. If your project is water related, make your plumber the co-chair. If your project is recycling related, be sure to involve the people who empty the baskets at night and crush your cardboard out at the loading dock. Energy related? Track down the best electrician. If your project is related to fuel efficiency, let your fleet mechanic join you—and let him talk as much as he wants to during your planning sessions.

The best committee I ever served on (for a complex recycling project inside one of New England’s tallest buildings) had a janitor seated at the table, surrounded by $100,000-a-year executives in $1,000 suits. An uncommon committee? Yes. An effective one? Extremely.

The metric is something that can be quantified and that will be key to evaluating the project from the outset to the conclusion. If your project is, say, to reduce water consumption between Time A and Time B, a good metric would be the number of gallons purchased during the prior year. If copier paper reduction is the target, the metric would be the number of cartons of paper purchased (or perhaps the number of pallets). An automotive fuel-reduction project would measure in terms of gallons of gasoline and diesel. For assistance in setting the metrics, turn to your facilities department, business operations group, and your procurement specialists. They will have all the data you’ll need.

Running the financial analysis of your environmental initiative is an important step in your businesslike approach.

Like the metric, the baseline is another number that is known and fixed. You’ll need to determine this at the outset of your project. You can take the overall number of the metric and divide by the number of people involved in the project. If your business consumes 2 million gallons of water in a year and you have 1,000 full-time employees (FTE), the baseline would be 2,000 gallons of water per FTE per year.

A baseline for a paper-use reduction project might be something like 25 reams of paper per FTE per year. A baseline for energy might be found by taking your total annual energy bill and dividing it by gross square footage of office and manufacturing space.

Without a good metric and baseline, you’ll never know if you are on the right path and if your goals were met.

Now that you know where you are going and where you started from, you’ll need to lay out your road map of best options. Just as you and your committee would do for any type of corporate-wide initiative, you will want to brainstorm together, ask employees at all levels for their ideas, and consult with friendly peers at companies similar to yours or in close proximity.

For excellent advice on specific environmental tactics you could consider, call the editors of trade magazines that cover your industry. Without a doubt, the magazine has written at least a few articles on the subject in recent years. Likewise, your national trade association has done an in-depth analysis of environmental issues in the industry, and they are ready and eager to help you go green. Chambers of commerce and trade associations, in general, loathe regulation and old-style command-and-control mandates, and want nothing more than to demonstrate to politicians that businesses such as yours are "doing the right thing voluntarily and successfully."

At the same time, your city government wants nothing more than for its corporate citizens to take the lead on environmental issues. Call your mayor’s office to ask for advice. Turn to these groups for superb, free counsel and listen well to the lessons they share. You’ll be glad you did, and they’ll be glad you did.

Your committee will need to assess the full range of possible options to meet your original goal and agree on the right series of steps. For a paper-use reduction project, tactics might include the elimination of free printing and mandatory double-sided copying. For an energy project, you might consider removing light bulbs from unnecessary fixtures and installing room sensors that automatically turn lights off in unoccupied areas as two of the hundreds of tactics you could take.

Once the ideas are developed, meet with and engage your colleagues, gain their insights, seek consensus, obtain buy-ins, and establish timelines.

Virtually all corporate-wide initiatives have costs associated with their roll-outs, and environmental initiatives are no different. Up-front costs for a paper reduction program—such as investments in document management hardware, printer tracker mechanisms, and e-billing software—need to be recognized and budgeted for. The procurement specialist on your E-Team can assist with accounting for the set-up costs.

It’s only fair to spread out the set-up costs over a reasonable, multiyear timeline to get a true sense of project cost. Remember, you went out of your way to recruit a procurement specialist and accountant for your committee. Running the financial analysis of your environmental initiative is an important step in your businesslike approach.

How will the project be funded, both initially and ongoing? Sources of funding could include the corporation’s capital project budget or operating budget, through a "performance contract" with an outside vendor, winning state or federal grants, etc. The performance contract is an increasingly popular option, through which an outside vendor will shoulder much or all of the implementation costs in return for a sizable cut of the eventual financial savings.

Now that you have all the ideas, funding, and people lined up, your environmental project is under way. However, this does not mean you must continue with it at all costs. If the project is off track in its early life, bail out. Abort entirely or fine-tune the plan through the committee, then regroup. On the other hand, if the project looks like a clear winner with a fast financial payback, accelerate phase-in and commit fully.

Throughout the project, you will want to monitor your progress toward meeting the original financial goal. And make no mistake: the savings can be substantial. When one considers that a typical American household now spends more than $5,000 per year to heat, cool, and light a residential home, one sees how the energy bills for corporate campuses and office parks, colleges and universities, and manufacturing plants can run into the millions of dollars annually. Trimming the bill by just a few percentage points will result in tens of thousands of dollars in net savings, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Work with your business operations specialists to determine a realistic financial target, and in order to come up with an honest cost-benefit analysis at its conclusion, keep track of all the set-up and operating costs associated with this project.

Once you see how painless and profitable it is to roll out an environmental initiative in your company, you will want to pursue a number of related projects.

Don’t lose sight of the fact that your project has dual goals: economic and ecologic. The ecologic goal is the one that is likely to spur your workforce into action, gain their enthusiasm, and carry it all to a successful conclusion. A problem with environmental projects, however, is that they tend to be difficult, if not impossible, to see. How, for example, can a typical desk worker picture what a "10 percent reduction in energy consumption," a "10 percent reduction in water consumption," or "50 tons of office paper" looks like? It really can’t be done, so it is wise to "translate" your initiatives into something they can see. The easier you make it for employees to visualize the good effect of what they are doing, the better your chances of overall success. Telling your colleagues that they "recycled enough paper to fill the playing surface of Turner Field with six feet of white paper" or "they saved enough water to fill 24 Olympic-size swimming pools" makes the intangible not just tangible but also quite compelling.

When the project winds down, your committee will need to objectively review all of its stages to see where the project succeeded or failed. Did the project finish early or late? On-budget or off? Why? Who should be held accountable? You’ll want to communicate all the key facts and lessons learned back to your corporate community and thank them sincerely for their good assistance. Also, be sure to share your results with the same leaders who kindly helped you in the planning stages. Trade magazines, trade associations, chambers of commerce, city governments, and friendly competitors are eager to hear of your experiences working towards voluntary solutions to environmental problems.

Once you see how painless and profitable it is to roll out an environmental initiative in your company, you will want to pursue a number of related projects. Follow the same steps you just took, but this time set bolder targets and reinvest the financial savings from one project into another. Money saved from energy conservation projects, for example, might pay for solar roof panels. Money raised from selling your scrap white office paper could go towards the purchase a special type of baling machine to let you add brown cardboard to your recycling program. Ask your in-house financial experts to set up a "revolving loan fund" or similar dedicated internal account for your committee. Tapping into an readily accessible and self-replenishing fund will greatly assist and speed your future efforts.

The Harvard Business School’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter, in her important book, The Change Masters, described the successful leader as "anticipating new actions that external events will eventually require, and taking them early, before others, before being forced, while there is still time to exercise choice about how and when and what." Just as your business demonstrates leadership in the niche in which it competes, so, too, can it lead the way with environmental excellence in its operations. ¨