Form a Green Team to Improve Your Work Environment

To raise employee awareness of opportunities to save energy and contribute to a healthy work environment, form a green team at work. While debate exists about recycling and other aspects of environmentalism, a green team is motivational for employees who want to make a difference in their work environment. Your millennial employees are especially anxious to make a difference in the world environment. A green team at work fits the bill.

The green team may even save energy and time, keep trash out of landfills, opt for reusable dishes, share books in a library, and more for your work environment. A team is a great way to brainstorm and develop ideas.

Like any other team, a green team is an opportunity to involve your employees and to let your employees learn to work together effectively, develop leadership and team skills, and make a difference in a cause that is near and dear to many employees' hearts. A green team sounds like a win for everyone.

Here are 20 ideas to get your green team members started as they brainstorm and implement their own ideas:

1. Keep room temperatures set at 68 degrees in the winter and 55 degrees at night.​
2. Experiment, because employees have to be comfortable, but use air conditioning with discretion during warm weather months.​
3. Turn off your office lights while you attend meetings during the day and at night and over the weekend.​
4. Limit the use of space heaters. Ask employees to dress more warmly instead. Space heaters can also become hazardous especially if employees forget to turn them off.
5. Recycle cans, bottles, newspapers, and magazines.​
6. Limit the use of disposable products at company-supplied lunches and events.​
7. Put your computer and printer on energy-saving settings when you know you'll be away from your desk for a while.​
8. Purchase energy-efficient appliances for your offices.​
9. Turn lights off in restrooms, conference rooms, libraries, and so forth when the room is not in use.​
10. Send extra food from company events and lunches home with employees or deliver the food to a local charity rather than throwing it away.​
11. Email advisories about how employees can use less paper. Examples include setting printers to duplex by default; print on both sides of paper for internal or personal use documents.​
12. Purchase large or refillable containers of creamer, sugar, salt, pepper, and butter instead of individual containers.​
13. Suggest lighting changes and use more energy-efficient bulbs.​
14. Buy all employees a "green team" sweatshirt that they can leave in their offices or cubicles to wear when feeling cold.​
15. Evaluate packaging, shipping, and marketing materials to eliminate waste.​
16. Ask vendors who supply company lunches not to deliver lunches in individual boxes.​
17. Encourage employee carpools. Provide transit discounts to encourage public transportation use.​
18. Encourage employees to recycle at home; provide a listing of recycling centers or reuse sites such as Freecycle.com.​
19. Donate unwanted cell phones to organizations such as Recellular, Inc., that will recycle, refurbish, and promote reuse to provide funding for charitable and environmental causes.​
20. Buy and sell used two-way radios, parts, and equipment at locations such as UsedRadios.com.

Your green team at work is a win for the employer, the employees, and the world environment that sustains us all. Use these ideas to help your green team get started. Your team is a welcome addition to your empowering, engaging work environment for employees. Don't let an opportunity so simple, yet so demonstrative of corporate social responsibility, pass you by. Form a green team at work.