The world is sinking into a difficultsocio-economical crisis. Companies are laying staff, reducing wages to try to raise benefits and save their business.Is it the best way to manage the crisis? I believe it does not need an expert to understand that in our circumstances it is not the adequate solution. Reducing the number of employees or their salary is only making it worse, since it is less money that re-introduced to the market again and more unemployed people costing to government. This is for the global picture and I have been wondering couldn’t companies think about a different way to act on wages and employees costs? Yes there is and it relies on innovating, investing your staff into the business’ life. Why? Because it is the only way to ensure they will change their behavior in a certain way that you can make further savings without laying them.

Understand your employees’ indirect impact on your cost?

Regardlessthe type of business you work in, the size or the form, investing your employees into the business’ life is an indirect way to act on your PnL. There are many ways to invest your staff; some companies choose financial ways other find more non-monetary solutions: solid teams by making special team’s events, others develop company’s culture and finally others try to improve environmental solutions making the company’s image more human, more close to the people that make it live every day.

This is the goal you need to accomplish in order to improve the company’s environmental impact through your employee’s decisions and actions. How? Your first step before requesting anything from anyone is to ensure you have the global view on where your employees influence your carbon footprint. Every human,like the machines you use,who works in thecompany, is also having an impact on your environmental impact. In parallel this influence has double result on your carbon footprint and your PnL:

• Overheads: during working hours, people consume energy, water, supplies, machines, electric devices impacting costs.
• Manufacturing costs: you and your employees make the decisions. The cost of raw material depends on the way the teams work and the processes implemented.
• Marketing Costs: they depend on the marketing strategy adopted (paper used,communication strategy, packaging, product…).

Actually at all level of your organization a group of people have an impact, and if this group is part of your employees than you can control it and manage it in a certain way to make this influence greener by implementing environmental procedures. It is important to ensure that you will act through your employees in order to reduce the carbon footprint by their actions. This is our goal in this article. At the end of this step, you should ensure a complete understanding on which elements you must act. In the above non-exhaustive list, a good final result of your study could be:

Having clearly defined your objectives and the change management team, you can easily start to engage your Employee’s Green Transition. For which you have two ways to act: by training and changing your employee’s behavior and/or by implementing project to modify processes and equipments.

Next week, step 2 Enployees’ Green Transition

Whatever the size of your business, if you ever need to evaluate a cost line of your business, do not hesitate to contact me camilledelcour@missblue.org. With your knowledge of your market and a precise analysis with pertinent tools, we can easily and cheaply find a way for you to get productivity, effectiveness and more profit by just making small changes that you never thought about. I can provide you excel database tools aligned to your type of business, or any other help you can possibly need to make your green transition a reality.