In the early nineties before I moved to the US, I remember visiting the country and being struck by the move toward becoming green. Reflected primarily in consumer goods and how manufacturers touted the ability to recycle their material as an indication of their green nature.

This past decade saw more companies making a move toward becoming green and aiding in sustainability in general, in the workplace. While it’s true that this has been used often by companies as a differentiator in their marketing efforts especially to win the hearts and minds of the customers today that care about such issues, it would be folly to dismiss the idea as either vapid or bad business.

At Nayamode, we’ve found that going green can generate several side benefits that may even outweigh the green benefits per se. Some of the steps we’ve taken include:

• Hotdesking at work – as we grew out of space in our existing offices we had the choice to either move, add more space or come up with a creative solution. In consultation with the team at large, we determined that hotdesking was a great alternative for us. Benefits included reduced carbon footprint overall, better employee morale (because of increased flex time) and reduced costs.
• Flex-time and work-from-home – most of our employees are expected to be in the office less than half the workweek, and are often in for considerably less. With an increasingly connected and mobile workforce, this doesn’t impact productivity while allowing people to leave their cars in the garage, save gas, money, emissions and time, while getting word done more happily.

Net – you can get happier employees, a better bottomline and be good to the environment all at once. This is almost too good to be true, you say? Maybe so, but our experience speaks to this being a practical, do-good, feel-good solution. With the mobility, productivity and general communication ease that new technologies provide today, it would be a bad business decision to not go green.