How To Achieve A More Energy Efficient Office

There are times when you have to choose between saving money and doing what’s best for customers and other stakeholders. These decisions can be tough, partly because they either have a negative impact on people or they hurt the bottom line.

But every now and then, you can do what’s right and boost your bottom line. In terms of energy efficiency in your office, you have an opportunity to reduce your impact on the local environment and expand your impact on the bottom line through lower energy expenditures. It’s a no-brainer for real property management, but you have to be intentional when you go about it. Here are six practical steps you can take in the right direction:

Educate Employees

As you’ve surely discovered in other areas of your business, the best-laid plans will fail if employees aren’t bought into the process. You need your staff to execute your ideas, otherwise they’ll remain only theoretical.

Spend some time educating your employees about the importance of being energy-efficient, and why it matters — not only to the company, but also to them as individuals. If you can communicate the cost-saving advantages of energy efficiency and tie them to some sort of personal benefit for each worker, you’re more likely to see great results.

Don’t Make These Heating and Cooling Mistakes

Heating and cooling is where you’ll make or break your office’s performance in using energy wisely. In addition to having the proper system installed, you also need to think about how you use it. Be strategic with the placement of thermostats throughout your office. You don’t want them to be in direct sunlight, because this will produce inaccurate readings and cause your system to work overtime. Second, you may need to lock the settings so employees don’t fiddle with the temperature.

Be Smart With Lights

Given all the lights in a typical office, it’s easy for irresponsible behavior to cause excessive energy use. In addition to educating staff on the importance of turning off lights when they stop needing them, you might take a few proactive measures. Firstly, install occupancy sensors that automatically turn off lights. This is a great solution for unused office areas such as executive office, conference rooms or employee lunch rooms.

Turn Off Idle Electronics

Are you familiar with phantom energy? It’s electricity that’s drawn from electronics that are powered off or idle, but still plugged in. In some cases, phantom energy accounts for as much as 10 percent of total electricity consumption in an office. You can avoid burning phantom energy is to unplug office electronics when they aren’t in use. But most people don’t do this mainly because it’s a hassle to reach under a desk or behind a shelf. However, if you use power strips, you can turn off multiple items at once.

Move To The Cloud

If you’re still using on-site servers and networking systems, you’re consuming a lot more energy than you have to. It’s more cost-effective to move away from on-premise solutions and migrate to a cloud provider. They can pay for all the infrastructure energy costs for several clients and save you money. You’ll reduce energy consumption, enhance productivity, and enjoy optimal efficiency on multiple levels.

Host Competitions

It often takes a little kick in the rear to motivate workers to get on board with a new habit. If you’re finding it challenging to get your team motivated, perhaps a competition or contest would do the trick? Contests turn energy efficiency from something the company wants of employees into something they can “win.” Get creative and be generous. A contest could change the entire outlook of your staff.

Adding It All Up

On its own, your office surely isn’t as efficient as it could be. By taking a purposeful and proactive approach to energy consumption, you can generate change in this area: change that has a positive impact on the environment and your bottom line. What’s not to love?

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