(Greenbiz.com) Businesses are becoming greener, not just because it’s right but because it makes sense.

Paul Marerro didn’t consciously try and start an environmentally conscious company. It happened naturally. Working out of a home office in Tampa, Fla., Marerro provides database and application enterprise architecting, report writing and project management services.

As his company grew, he hired a full-time employee in Iowa and added contractors in Cincinnati and Florida. All had worked for Marerro before in traditional offices. But the time for traditional offices has passed, both for Marrero and for a growing number of companies.

“It’s all telecommuting,” Marerro said.If he had more full-time employees, he’d consider a virtual office, which would allow facilities like a conference room and phone-answering service. But for now, he’s happy, he said.

Marerro doesn’t have much waste and while he can’t go totally paperless, waste paper is shredded and recycled. His business cards are made from recycled paper and all invoices are e-mailed. When he visits his largest client in Philadelphia, he walks or takes public transportation around the city.

“The green has worked its way in,” Marerro said. “We consume electricity but nowhere near the amount of an office building. It’s a room in your house.

“Ideally, Marerro said he’d like to grow the business while expanding his green practices to include solar panels for his home and office. “But it’s also nice to have several large clients, stay focused, give quality and there shouldn’t be a lot of waste,” he said.

Real estate executives and facility managers at medium to large companies are sometimes way off when it comes to occupancy rates, says John Anderson. Most think their facilities are being used 80 or 90 percent of the time. Upon tracking the data, they are often surprised to learn that they are using their space less than 50 percent of the time.

Anderson’s PeopleCube office hoteling software allows employees to schedule activities to secure a work space or room or office as needed.

The office and employer of the future invite employee participation and collaboration, which is key, Anderson said.

“You input your own carbon footprint. For example, you don’t own a cubicle so you rent one for a day. You set the air conditioning and lighting as you like, contributing to the carbon offset.”

Facilities represent the second highest expense for large businesses and the No. 1 manufacturer of emissions, according Anderson. Many employers are paying too much to heat and cool conference rooms that are hardly used and to illuminate cubicles too often left empty. Allowing employees to telecommute from home at least part of the week could cut costs significantly.

Traditionally, tracking and analyzing data from workflow patterns involves looking backward. Anderson suggests a mind shift that would require companies to establish baselines before demonstrating and measuring savings going forward.

Using the data more efficiently can help lower carbon footprint by reducing real estate costs and increasing energy efficiency up to 30 percent, he said.”You need to establish what your baselines are before you can demonstrate and measure savings going forward,” Anderson said. “Companies are just starting to do that today.”

John Larson remembers when a U.S. Interstate Highway collapsed three blocks from where he worked in Minneapolis-St Paul in 2007. There was an immediate reaction by politicians and transportation officials who needed to reroute hundreds of thousands of vehicles every day. If these commuters’ companies had put a telecommuting plan in place, that problem could potentially have been solved almost instantly.

Larson is a spokesperson for Results-Only Working Environment, or ROWE, a new way of managing people developed by two women who worked in human resources at Best Buy. The idea of ROWE is to allow flexible schedules, forcing managers to concentrate on outcomes rather than hours.

Best Buy adopted the ROWE plan at its headquarters, staggering arrival times for employees throughout the work day and cutting down on commute times.

“Those 4,000 people in Best Buy — 2,500 to 3,000 still go to work each day but not all at the same time,” Larson said. “People go at all hours so you don’t have a giant crush of cars stalled in traffic.”

Only a handful of companies have adopted the results-only philosophy. “But if ROWE became the status quo, it would have a tremendous impact on the environment,” Larson said.

Anderson’s 65 employees book conference space and cubicles on an as-needed basis, telecommuting when they don’t need to be in the office.

Telecommuting is a huge incentive, PeopleCube’s John Anderson said. It helps employees balance work and home life. Not having to drive an hour or more each way sometimes results in employees spending that saved commute-time working.

“After the salary, the number-one attraction is telecommuting,” he said. “You’re now dealing with millennial kids exiting college and they’re very environmentally conscious. Employees want to know that their company is driving in those directions. It’s a recruiting strategy too.”

Employee participation can sound like a scary proposition for the traditional office scenario.  There are two schools of thought regarding control, according to Anderson: One is that employees aren’t going to help, so bosses have to force them to do what bosses want. The other is that the more employees are included in decision-making, the more they will help.

Educating employees about green office practices is vital, Anderson said.

“You’d be surprised what the employee population is willing to do,” he said. “People are more willing to pitch in if you incent them to participate.”

Incentives include funding transportation if employees leave their cars at home, bringing a homey feel into the office by having living-room type set-ups or having a Starbucks in the building.

Some of the more radical changes in green offices of the future have to do with amenities-based interiors and designs based around increased productivity. Think laundry room at the office so you don’t have to send out.

Some banks, insurance and technology companies are creating positions for sustainability officers dedicated to reducing carbon footprint. Others resist, saying they want to be environmentally conscious but have to have a return on their investment in everything they do. Whether they’re in stocks, paper recycling or can recycling, there’s a prevailing mentality in the executive suite that if you’re not in the office today, you’re not really working.

“Our employees that telecommute are probably more productive than those that come in,” Anderson said. “As long as I’m getting a day’s work out of you I don’t really care. Telecommuting has a high degree of success.”

-

Content from Dana Sanchez as posted on Greeenbiz.com.

(Harvard Business Publishing) If we have any doubt about the prevalence - and cost - of “short-termism” in global capital markets, the current economic meltdown is an obvious reminder. But, beyond the $700 billion bailout and other financial band-aids to stop the bleeding, the bigger debate is how to fix the regulatory and corporate governance systems to avoid future calamities — whether financial or environmental.

A critical question is to whom companies should be most beholden to — shareholders or society.

The question popped into my head last week viewing a short preview of a PBS Frontline documentary “Heat” about the challenges of reversing global warming. Among the film’s most poignant moments was an exchange between the film’s producer and a Chinese energy company executive who was asked if he felt any obligation to reduce CO2 emissions from his company’s fast-growing fleet of new coal plants.

The CEO’s immediate answer was an unequivocal, ‘no.’ “We must create money, not lose the money,” Shenhua Energy CEO Ling Wen said. “It’s my responsibility as a CEO of this company.”

When pressed whether he should make climate change a higher priority, Wen said that he would if his shareholders asked him. But, he added, “I’m afraid maybe all the shareholders, they cannot accept that concept.” In the meantime, China continues to build two new coal-fired power plants every week.

I wasn’t surprised by Wen’s answer, but it was a chilling reminder about the extent to which global capitalism — and the investors and companies that drive the global economy — has lost its way in terms of its overriding purpose.

While I’m all in favor of wealth creation and rewarding success, how we define corporate success is out of whack. Shareholders — an increasingly vague term with the growth of hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds — should not be the preeminent rulers of companies and quarterly earnings should not be the only gauge for measuring CEO performance. We need to broaden our definition of success so that long-term corporate sustainability and long-term global sustainability get the attention they deserve. Failing to do so will mean more global calamities, both financial and environmental, as the grow-at-all-costs global economy races ahead with little regard for social and environmental consequences.

I do not have all the answers on this, but many other smart people have been pondering these issues the past few years since the Enron debacle — and their ideas deserve close attention.

In June 2007, a broad coalition of leading companies, investors, and other stakeholders released the Aspen Principles for Long-Term Value Creation as a call to action to reverse the capital market’s bias toward short-term thinking. Among the key corporate actions it identified:

• Setting long-term metrics that de-emphasize earnings per share and quarterly profits as the metric of choice

• Incentive systems and compensation schemes that reward long-term focus and success

More recently, Corporation 20/20 came out with its own set of policies for fostering corporate long-termism. Among the group’s key principles is that the corporation shall accrue “fair returns for shareholders, but not at the expense of the legitimate interests of other stakeholders,” such as employees, communities, the environment and future generations. One suggestion the group makes for achieving this is reducing the clout of short-term investors (hint: hedge funds) inclined to quick fixes to boost short-term profits. One lever the group suggests is requiring investors to hold shares for a year before before gaining voting rights or increasing capital gains taxes on short-term trades. Similarly, compensation incentives might be changed to modify or even outlaw stock options, or make bonuses contingent on achieving social and environmental performance targets.

While these ideas may seem radical, they are worthy of attention once the dust settles on Wall Street and the focus shifts to addressing the fundamental market drivers that contributed to the collapse.

-

Content from Mindy S. Lubber as posted on Harvard Business Publishing.

Most people in business, community, and government are focusing on tactical and survival-based responses in order to deal with the current financial crisis. I would suggest that sustainability initiatives are an essential element for everyone to consider in order to minimize financial imbalances and limit overhead.

This is a time when it is important for pay very close attention to what you spend. That doesn’t always mean that spending needs to be frozen, but it does mean that value is a more important consideration than ever.

I have found that the sustainable marketing message is becoming increasingly attractive to my clients. At Harvest we show clients how to reduce resource use, reduce environmental impact, and reduce overall expense. Cumulatively these benefits help their companies be more socially responsible which is a critical response to the current environmental crisis. But responsible spending is absolutely essential in this atmosphere of economic crisis.

So many people focus exclusively on the environmental aspects of sustainable business. But there is an opportunity to drive home the message that this practice is a very practical solution to tightening budgets with a continued demand to increase sales.

If you are looking for more information for your home or business, make sure you look through the links listed on the right of this page. There are some excellent resources for learning more. Or feel free to contact me if you are in the Omaha area and I can share what I know.

Despite the best efforts of large and small companies, one of the biggest obstacles to going green remains this: significantly reducing or eliminating the huge amount of paper, toner ink, and other materials needed to produce legal documents, invoices, and other critical communications.

What is more, many companies striving for greenness rely on overnight delivery services to ship such documentation, when in fact they could dramatically reduce this expense.

So leave it to current market conditions, driven by record-high energy prices, to force company management to rethink the manner in which official documents and communications are produced and delivered. And now, a fast-growing 5 year-old green company, DocuSign, is working “to make electronic signatures as ubiquitous and simple as email.”

According to the company’s website, advantages include:

• Eliminate unnecessary costs
• No more overnight shipping, faxing delays, or signing errors
• Increase revenue
• Use the web to close deals in seconds and lock out competitors
• Competitive edge
• Grow business faster and more efficiently

By employing electronic signature technology, any company could eliminate thousands (or millions) of dollars in administrative expenses, and in the process save a forest.

At Harvest, we are currently researching electronic signatures for proposal approvals and proof sign-offs. It will help us improve the speed of our operations and improve our overall quality and service.

Once again, a simple and sustainable innovation can save waste and expense.

–

Source: Sturdy Roots

Hewlett-Packard yesterday announced a suite of products and programs aimed and reducing the amount of paper and energy offices use in their daily operations.

HP’s Eco-Solutions line includes a new green label, called Eco Highlights, which identifies the environmental attributes of a product or service - from energy use to duplex-printing features to end-of-life recyclability of the products. The first products included under the label are the LaserJet P4510 and P4015 series of printers and the DeskJet D2545 printer.

The D2545 printer was also announced yesterday by HP. With over 80 percent of the product’s plastic made from recycled material, it is the company’s most recyclable printer, and the cartridges it uses are molded from recycled plastic resins.

On top of that, the overall packaging for the printer is fully recyclable; the printer is qualified for Energy Star certification; and it comes with HP’s Smart Web Printing technology, which saves paper by combining on one sheet the portions of websites that would otherwise take up a full page of paper. The company also plans to introduce another green printer this summer that uses HP’s closed-loop plastic recycling process.

The HP website also includes a helpful Energy Tips page to help reduce energy usage in the home or office.