The world is sinking into a difficult socio-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.

Believe in your ideas and in your project or fail

Like any project you need to have a tool to ensure that you have chosen the correct method and strategy, and to do so, you need to implement easy and useful tools that will help you: communicate, follow and alert.

Giving orders and guidelines by sending a beautiful brochure / mail / newsletter is great but what about what is going on after your actions, after your impressive communication and all the workshops, seminars you have implemented for your employees? What is on reality the impact you have effectively allowed? How will you present to your boss / owner or to yourself that you made it happen? Because it is very nice to speak about green project and green behavior, but the reality matters and to ensure a correct follow-up you need to think from the beginning what will be your control strategy.

Quantitative indicators: as a finance person, I will of course advice to implement easy and multi-use quantitative indicators which will give you that possibility to communicate them to the employees in order for them too to see their impact, the result of their own change. Implement individual indicators combined to global indicators so that you have the tools to target an employee, a team, a business line. A good quantitative indicator must include several characteristics: it should be user friendly (it must “speak” to everyone, and not only the person that is in charge of its follow-up), allow benchmark with the market or specific studies, allows you to evaluate the performance of your project.

Some companies implemented specific platform for carpooling in order to help employees to organize their transportation, allowing them to meet and reduce the number of cars on the road.This tool is not only a great way to introduce a more environmental way for the employees to go and come to work, but it is also a good way to improve employees team working, ensuring a positive impact on the carbon footprint of the company. Innovate, think and create your own enterprise green system. And of course ensure a reward system, it can be monetary or congratulations in order to ensure that all the company understands the importance, participates and produce result.

Of course do not overload the change management team with follow-ups it could then make it ineffective rather than revolutionizing. Finally the last important thing that we should underline is that all the management should participate at 100% to each action and become an example to the employees. This attitude will show how important and serious you are and proof that it is not just marketing it is a new culture you want to implement. Believe in your ideas and in your project.

As much effort a company makes to become environmentally friendly, if the employees do not follow,it will be difficult to achieve the goal in time and as schedule. Companies are information systems, processes and never forget people. An environmental company/store must ensure that employees make their best to adopt ecological attitude at work and even more at home. It is always remarkable how you can make a project a success when you know in depth to whom you address to and where you want to be at the end of the project.

Read 1^st Part here

Read 2^nd Part here

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.