Visible Sustainability: Six Concepts to Promote a Greener Office

Visible Sustainability is an effective means of cultivating the steadfast dedication that is needed in your workplace to achieve your environmental goals. Through displays, info-graphics and participatory exercises, you can promote an environmentally conscious corporate-culture. Long after the initial enthusiasm of launching your green initiative, visible sustainability keeps the momentum going.

Key Ideas

1) Create Momentum: Sustainability is about creating and building momentum to maintain change by organizing and maximizing company assets and resources. A Visible Sustainability display will keep these values as a standard of your office life. The visual presence of information, programs and events will sustain the presence of environmental values. This use of experience design is effective because the message is kept near the areas where it will have the greatest behavioral impact. Visible sustainability keeps the message in plain sight and in the hearts and minds of all who enter your premises.

2) Clearly Communicate Your Goals: Effective green initiatives have specific goals and benchmarks to meet. Making sure that your employees and visitors clearly understand the company’s environmental practices, will focus their efforts where it matters the most. Employees may bring different environmental practices from prior jobs or habits from home. A visible sustainability campaign aligns the effort to produce measurable results.

3) Employee Engagement Through Targets: An updateable display of targets and achievements gets everyone on board. With a graphic display, targets are published for everyone to see and celebrated when they are met. The challenges of Environmental Compliance become a source of employee pride as everyone contributes to achieve and surpass the set goals. The secondary effect is an all-around engaged employee. The notion of working towards a better world and making the company better becomes one the same. It merges values with the result of building on motivation.

4) Linking Branding and CSR: All design solutions should create brand assets that put in evidence a solidarity between your company’s brand and environmental values. It communicates to visitors that you are a value-driven company. This position raises the value proposition of the brand. To associate with your brand is more than the exchange of goods and services, but also carries through societal and community values. The picture of your company is more holistic, and of a broader appeal.

To achieve the recognition as a responsible brand is beneficial beyond developing new customers but also serves in attracting an engaged workforce. According to Pew Research, “80% of millennials prefer to work for sustainable employers.” Visible sustainability will make you competitive in the workforce market. It is one more reason to feel proud of the place you work.

5) Authenticate Your Efforts: Visible sustainability must provide results and experiences that avoid the traps of greenwashing. Pin all your information and discussions to verifiable data. In the end green initiatives make demands on transparency, because we are giving a platform to ethical issues. Believability is an essential component of ethical discussions like the environment. Any perception of tampering with data will betray your communication. One of the simplest means of achieving transparency and truthful dialogue is with participation from all levels of company ranks. Broad participation makes the process of accumulating and communicating your sustainability results more democratic and consequently less compromised. This means that your visible sustainability communication must present itselves as the work of a group.

6) Cross-departmental team building: A green team works best when its members come from all departments and locations. Goals can be met more thoroughly and higher standards can be set because the impact of the team is broader. A secondary benefit to a cross-departmental team is that it provides employees the opportunity to leave their “silos” and learn about other areas of the company. It helps employees acquire the ”big-picture” view of the company. It is also an exercise in building a corporate culture that is aware of what benefits the entire corporation.

Visible sustainability is about creating the right culture in your firm to achieve your environmental goals. The focus is on communication and corporate culture. Specific environmental strategies depend on each company’s needs and opportunities. We believe that all green initiatives need the commitment of a broad base of employees in order to succeed. The efforts must also be aligned with company values, otherwise the initiative may fall out-of-sync with company operations. Visible sustainability is the guide to environmental success.

Branded Environments LLC helps companies merge office life with environmental values.

Visible Sustainability Green Office Environment

Environmental Team info-graphics

Vertical garden proposal with visible sustainability center

Vertical garden proposal with a visible sustainability center

Green Office

Office lounge with an environmental theme

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