A comment from Meryn Stol resurrected my interest in green working‘, a concept that came up in some of my earlier discussions with my friend Bruno de Beauregard, one of France’s pioneers in the field of online collaborative tools, and now involved with Netcipia, a wiki startup. Green working is a way of living that minimizes carbon costs associated with traditional work models. I have boiled it down to six principles:
- Work from home
- If not possible, find a place of work close to home
- Either walk, bike or use public transportation to go to work
- Limit number of days in outside office
- Minimize business travel as much as possible
- When in the office, become an environmental advocate, e.g, insist that all lights and equipment be turned off when not in use
This, folks is how I would answer Pamela Poole’s question, What Does the 21st-Century Workplace Look Like? The most exciting part about the green working concept, is the existence of emerging technologies, that will soon make it a reality for the majority of workers in the world. The following video features Cisco telepresence technology of remote collaboration, as demonstrated by John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, and Al Gore during their virtual meeting, at the recent VoiceCon 2008 Conference:
Pretty exciting! For more on Cisco‘s green working related initiatives, click here.
Hey, I’m a green worker and didn’t even realize it! Fantastic list…now we need to get companies to adopt them. It’s amazing how many are still scared of teleworking. I was fortunate to work for Texas Instruments for more than four years in a telecommuting position. It was fantastic.
I believe there’s huge untapped potential here. The problem is mainly in the sluggishness of business practices.
Our best hope for making “green working” come true is in the relatively small and innovative consulting companies. I think they could have a unique selling point with offering “green” advice.
We should have more people like Bruno.
In some companies, management may succumb to employee pressure of course. But then I think they’d still would want to hire consultants to change their collaboration infrastructure, so demand coming from employees could make this a very tight and thus profitable market.
Meryn, Lynn, your comments make me think, we should have a ‘business honor roll’ to give positive strokes to all the businesses that are doing good . . . As I wrote in my earlier post about Adina and its CEO, it is not easy being a sustainable business, and people in these kinds of companies could benefit from the support of people like you and I. It can be pretty lonely sometimes as a corporate eco-warrior. Lots of pressures from various stakeholders with often times competing agendas.
Something like http://dotherightthing.com/ ?
I just found that site today.
Interesting: http://www.cleanaircampaign.com/
this speaks to way more sensibilities than I can begin to comment on
if i currently had to pay for gas to commute to work, i’d be doomed, if i had to wear business attire all the time, i’d be doomed, if i had to court clients through the look/ feel and costs of overhead I’d be doomed
instead i’ve got pajamas, a telephone and my computer
YES!
my son is looking for this very demographic for his summer job
he says why would anyone fuel these gas prices ?
Meryn, thanks for the dotherightthing link. I forgot about them? Great resource.
Karen, you are leading the way . . .
Hi lamarguerite.
Thanks for the link to the WWD post about the 21st-century workplace. As far as I’m concerned, the greenness of working from home is one of the most gratifying side effects and one of the best selling points for the model.
The green aspect of telework seems obvious to some of us and it’s frustrating that so few people seem to even be aware of this or to understand the urgent need for changing the way we work.
Work and the workplace are going to have to adapt to our societal shift towards the Internet and we will have no choice but to shift to telework given the rapid, continuing destruction of the planet. When are people going to wake up??
You are welcome!
I think mothers will play a critical role here. After all, they have, secretly been asking for this for a very long time . . .
Why don’t more people seem to be aware or understand this? My hunch is they are just not thinking about it. I wrote a while back about the power of inertia. The habit of getting dressed and going to work is so ingrained in the Western culture, that it is taken as a given, even though in many cases, it comes at a high price. Price of gas for transportation, price of time away from family, price of time wasted in transportation, price of being in an artificial environment . . .
I have actually read a study that says that people are much more productive at home than at the office.
The only costs that are see are loss of cross-pollination from daily interactions at the office, and also loss of socialization from meeting coworkers every day. These two things can be mitigated however, with hybrid solutions involving some days at work, and also a re-energizing of neighborhood social networks. If people start working more from home, they will be more available for their home communities, and to become active in local activities.
FYI, more statistics on green working:
http://webworkerdaily.com/2008/04/19/telecommute-to-save-the-planet/
Thanks Meryn, for the tip.
Bonjour Marguerite:
Ca tombe bien.
Je viens de commencer un nouveau job.
I work for a company based in LA and Atlanta and I am in Philadelphia. I work from home.
I thought I would give me time to write for my blog – but no cigar. Turns out that I work harder from home than if I were in an office.
No distractions, no commuting, no colleague to have lunch with
We do have remote collaboration tools that we use which don’t always work and I find it difficult to build teams with people who hardly meet in person.
I love the fact that I am not commuting at all, that I am actually working remotely and that I can work unshaved in my semi grungy sweater and be just as effective.
Let’s create a Sustainable Business Practices Award to reward the businesses that are really trying to do something to reduce their carbon footprint.
Love your idea of the Award. Want to take that one on!
Congrats on the new job.
[…] in schools. There are trees along all the streets and the freeways. People spend most of their time working from home or very close. They work shorter hours, and they use video conference technologies such as Cisco […]