Framing workplace activity to achieve sustainability

An ideal workplace requires the approach of ‘home sustainability’, which is mostly influenced by our personal choices/decisions

The word ‘sustainability’ exposes a part of our everyday life. Every individual action at workplace or home, whether it is small or large – can be a significant contribution in achieving sustainability. Our individual collective efforts in the daily life may lead us towards achieving a sustainable future.  Adopting Sustainability concept in corporate culture may reshape our daily lifestyle and provides us many strategic directions to overcome the sustainability challenges. These challenges can be raised from our behavioral attitude in consuming water, air, energy, food etc. Our physical and mental health is also influenced by our consumption behavior of these resources in corporate life, which certainly stimulate employee efficiency and skills in many ways. Our new attitude to behavioral change offers some ways to think about everyday’s corporate decisions and give some tips to be applied in an office culture. In that case, we should first identify the concerned resources as much as possible to look deeper into the sustainability issues that matter to us mostly. The useful checklist may be prepared in order to consume our natural resources sustainably, which keep both our financial sustainability and good health. This can be a very important agenda for any of the implementation programs at workplace, since every organization from now should deserve to be transformed in the context of achieving SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals). As a developing country, we are liable to be sustained within our lifestyle based thinking and activities that would help starting to be aligned with global changes and track our success.

Based on the sustainability approach, we therefore need to know the root of making both personal and organizational decisions in our lifestyle, even though we have our many limitations. If sustainability refers to our collec¬tive needs, how does it look like ‘successes’ in our workplaces? It’s an unanimous answer that an ideal office should have some essential characteristics like: environment friendly or, healthy surroundings to live in; comfortable and good-looking; smooth access of work possibly with a small gymnasium facilities; affordable to operations and maintenance; connected to cooperative neighborhood and community; and well-organized and shared mentality for using energy, water, space and materials. Therefore, an ideal workplace or corporate office requires the approach of ‘home sustainability’, which is mostly influenced by our personal choices/decisions, and that should be taken by understanding the root causes of unsustainability, and the relevant opportunities to form more sustainable choices. In general, the principles of this process address the four following categories as we are assuming a reality for making sustainability based practices at offices.

1) Utilities: It refers to some basic utilities in our daily life- water, electricity, fuel, gas etc. Most of these services are directly related to release harmful gases into the atmosphere. If we could make a good plan with alternative options of these services, we would be able to keep our offices in a sustainable manner. For example, we can produce electricity from the renewable resources like solar and waste in a small scale. In addition, we can use natural light (sunlight) and, or sensor light for most of the spaces of the office building. Another example, in case of water supply system, some inexpensive devices we may think about in our supply system, e.g. faucet aerators, low flow bathroom devices. Rainwater harvesting and preservation can be another source of our daily water needs to utilize our basic utilities. However, any of these systems may be implemented upon consultation with the respective expertise. Overall new applied methods may promote us to minimize basic costs of utilities as well.

2) Fitness centre: It can be organized a small place for the gymnasium at office premises. To go through a healthy lifestyle, an individual or group can use this space after office time or at weekend/holidays in different ways, e.g. daily-basis, slot-wise, booking-wise. For this purpose, we may initially set-up the fitness centre with some basic and selective instruments. On the other hand, we take place for moving around by means of walking, driving, cycling, train and boat. In the sustainability practices, we would like to promote walking and cycling in the office culture. In this case, we can set-up a small cycle pool at office premises under the fitness centre. People can rent a cycle for their different purposes either in an official and/or personally. For short distances around the office/city, cycling can be the best option in our transport behavior towards sustainability. However, the fitness centre including ‘rent a cycle’ can be conducted in expense of token money for the employees to recover the process implementation.

3) Waste management: The production of waste at the office should be allowed in becoming self-sustained by nature. That means, waste can be reduced, recycled, or disposed of in following the process. Overall, we can design to manage corporate waste collectively in the four processes- reduce, reuse, recycle, or disposing. For this purpose, we can organize separate bins at office premises to collect separate types of wastes for reuse, recycle and dispose. We can also develop and circulate our strategic approach among the people to manage wastes in our daily activities.   

4) Desktop gardening: The process of desktop/indoor gardening is not only an aesthetic beauty for us, but our physical, mental and emotional wellbeing can be influenced positively by the gardening. It could be achieved by keeping the good health of our environment as well. In some ways, we can keep our office healthy. For example, greening the surroundings of individual desktop, meeting room, or corridors of the office can be good initiatives in corporate practices towards sustainability. Especially, some selective long grassy trees and flowers can be grown to conserve our environment by minimizing carbon footprint, and purify our body and soul to be more concentrated at our job.

However, it is important to think about a sustainability based corporate culture that might solve many of our daily problems in the most advanced methods/realistic ways of global demand. Corporate based sustainability solutions can act as a system like a complex function of our daily demands. On the other hand, rapid and unplanned growth in Dhaka is imposing an increased trend of stresses towards the environment. In terms of water, the very real impacts of these pressures include declining groundwater levels. Regarding electricity, only half of the total population in Bangladesh has access to electricity. The per capita energy consumption in Bangladesh is also one of the lowest in the world. So, the time has come when we must start understanding more than ever before the importance of an individual’s participation in societal change.

The writer is Senior Research Associate at BRAC Research and Evaluation Division

[email protected]; [email protected]

 

 

Framing workplace activity to achieve sustainability

An ideal workplace requires the approach of home sustainability, which is mostly influenced by our personal choices/decisions

The word sustainability exposes a part of our everyday life. Every individual action at workplace or home, whether it is small or large can be a significant contribution in achieving sustainability. Our individual collective efforts in the daily life may lead us towards achieving a sustainable future. Adopting Sustainability concept in corporate culture may reshape our daily lifestyle and provides us many strategic directions to overcome the sustainability challenges. These challenges can be raised from our behavioral attitude in consuming water, air, energy, food etc. Our physical and mental health is also influenced by our consumption behavior of these resources in corporate life, which certainly stimulate employee efficiency and skills in many ways. Our new attitude to behavioral change offers some ways to think about everydays corporate decisions and give some tips to be applied in an office culture. In that case, we should first identify the concerned resources as much as possible to look deeper into the sustainability issues that matter to us mostly. The useful checklist may be prepared in order to consume our natural resources sustainably, which keep both our financial sustainability and good health. This can be a very important agenda for any of the implementation programs at workplace, since every organization from now should deserve to be transformed in the context of achieving SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals). As a developing country, we are liable to be sustained within our lifestyle based thinking and activities that would help starting to be aligned with global changes and track our success. Based on the sustainability approach, we therefore need to know the root of making both personal and organizational decisions in our lifestyle, even though we have our many limitations. If sustainability refers to our collective needs, how does it look like successes in our workplaces? Its an unanimous answer that an ideal office should have some essential characteristics like: environment friendly or, healthy surroundings to live in; comfortable and good-looking; smooth access of work possibly with a small gymnasium facilities; affordable to operations and maintenance; connected to cooperative neighborhood and community; and well-organized and shared mentality for using energy, water, space and materials. Therefore, an ideal workplace or corporate office requires the approach of home sustainability, which is mostly influenced by our personal choices/decisions, and that should be taken by understanding the root causes of unsustainability, and the relevant opportunities to form more sustainable choices. In general, the principles of this process address the four following categories as we are assuming a reality for making sustainability based practices at offices. 1) Utilities: It refers to some basic utilities in our daily life- water, electricity, fuel, gas etc. Most of these services are directly related to release harmful gases into the atmosphere. If we could make a good plan with alternative options of these services, we would be able to keep our offices in a sustainable manner. For example, we can produce electricity from the renewable resources like solar and waste in a small scale. In addition, we can use natural light (sunlight) and, or sensor light for most of the spaces of the office building. Another example, in case of water supply system, some inexpensive devices we may think about in our supply system, e.g. faucet aerators, low flow bathroom devices. Rainwater harvesting and preservation can be another source of our daily water needs to utilize our basic utilities. However, any of these systems may be implemented upon consultation with the respective expertise. Overall new applied methods may promote us to minimize basic costs of utilities as well. 2) Fitness centre: It can be organized a small place for the gymnasium at office premises. To go through a healthy lifestyle, an individual or group can use this space after office time or at weekend/holidays in different ways, e.g. daily-basis, slot-wise, booking-wise. For this purpose, we may initially set-up the fitness centre with some basic and selective instruments. On the other hand, we take place for moving around by means of walking, driving, cycling, train and boat. In the sustainability practices, we would like to promote walking and cycling in the office culture. In this case, we can set-up a small cycle pool at office premises under the fitness centre. People can rent a cycle for their different purposes either in an official and/or personally. For short distances around the office/city, cycling can be the best option in our transport behavior towards sustainability. However, the fitness centre including rent a cycle can be conducted in expense of token money for the employees to recover the process implementation. 3) Waste management: The production of waste at the office should be allowed in becoming self-sustained by nature. That means, waste can be reduced, recycled, or disposed of in following the process. Overall, we can design to manage corporate waste collectively in the four processes- reduce, reuse, recycle, or disposing. For this purpose, we can organize separate bins at office premises to collect separate types of wastes for reuse, recycle and dispose. We can also develop and circulate our strategic approach among the people to manage wastes in our daily activities. 4) Desktop gardening: The process of desktop/indoor gardening is not only an aesthetic beauty for us, but our physical, mental and emotional wellbeing can be influenced positively by the gardening. It could be achieved by keeping the good health of our environment as well. In some ways, we can keep our office healthy. For example, greening the surroundings of individual desktop, meeting room, or corridors of the office can be good initiatives in corporate practices towards sustainability. Especially, some selective long grassy trees and flowers can be grown to conserve our environment by minimizing carbon footprint, and purify our body and soul to be more concentrated at our job. However, it is important to think about a sustainability based corporate culture that might solve many of our daily problems in the most advanced methods/realistic ways of global demand. Corporate based sustainability solutions can act as a system like a complex function of our daily demands. On the other hand, rapid and unplanned growth in Dhaka is imposing an increased trend of stresses towards the environment. In terms of water, the very real impacts of these pressures include declining groundwater levels. Regarding electricity, only half of the total population in Bangladesh has access to electricity. The per capita energy consumption in Bangladesh is also one of the lowest in the world. So, the time has come when we must start understanding more than ever before the importance of an individuals participation in societal change. The writer is Senior Research Associate at BRAC Research and Evaluation Division [email protected]; [email protected]