By Budda Oliver

Often times, instituting a new policy in a place of business can be like pulling teeth. It seems that no matter how clearly you present the proposal, how successfully you outline the goals and the methods, and however much time and sympathy you give to your employees, that inevitably, you will face resistance and obstacles in successfully achieving a new goal.

There is almost no area where this policy conundrum is more apparent than in the arena of environmental sustainability. Truthfully, this type of inertia is present in every aspect of environmental policy from the levels of federal government to simple behavioral changes at home, but at the business level, for a manager or a supervisor, instituting new, green-friendly policies can be a seriously frustrating and halting process.

Before you enlist the services of an environmental consulting firm, or consider walking out of your job out of frustration, try reaching your employees through multiple mediums of communication. While there is no substitute for a well thought out meeting and a persistent, patient approach, your employees will certainly appreciate the effort and the accessibility of repeated environmental reminders through multiple mediums of communication.

You will need to reinforce your commitment to sustainable ecological practices through multiple avenues of environmental consciousness. Surely, you should call a brief meeting with your coworkers to address the issue of sustainability and field any questions that they have on the issue, but you should broach the issue through other communication mediums as well. Consider combining an environmental meeting with such techniques as an office wide environmental memo, a posted list of office environmental guidelines, and bi-weekly update of environmental progress in the office.

You will definitely want to be careful not to turn office sustainability into another of those dreaded time wasting office procedures and you will not want to over saturate your coworkers and lose their attention through repetitive statements and commands, but you should certainly take the time and energy to show your coworkers that you are not simply giving sustainability lip service. If you treat greening your office as a real goal and a real challenge, your employees will follow suit.

The key to greening your office is to understand the particular challenges and obstacles that face the success of your goal. It is one thing to say to yourself or to your employees that you’d like to make your workplace an environmentally friendly place, but it is an entirely different thing to actually achieve energy efficiency and a green work environment. Realize that you will need to reinforce your message through multiple communication mediums to achieve the results you would like to see in your place of business.

Mr. Oliver is a marketing agent of Servidyne. The green building consultant provides building performance efficiency throughout the nation. For more information on their Green Building Consultants please visit their website.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Budda_Oliver
http://EzineArticles.com/?Using-Your-Resources—Environmental-Sustainability-in-the-Workplace&id=1918706