Easy Being Green?

Why Kermit The Frog isn't much more popular is a mystery to me. He of the "Isn't Easy Being Green" fame hasn't been discovered yet by the environmental movement, much to my chagrin. And, I think office workers, uninspired by the push to go green, could use him. Your caffeine-deluged workforce tosses cans of Diet Coke and Diet Red Bull into the little blue receptacles attached to their trash cans, but you could do a lot better with a little inspiration.

Kermit comes to mind because what you need is a mascot or theme to remind staffers to only print e-mail when necessary, and to use excess printer output as scrap paper. What if you had an office character to follow your workers around in their minds as their environmental conscience? I don't know how intimidating you find puppet frogs, but you need to create a theme that will serve as a reminder to them. If Kermit doesn't suit your office's culture (not sophisticated enough/too sophisticated), create green-themed signs with your own environmental logo that can be posted to printers, copiers, faxes, and the refrigerator in the kitchen--any place with a conceivable recycling, or other environmental, intersection.

You might even create a contest around the effort. How about the worker who comes up with the most innovative idea related to improving your company's ecological "footprint" gets a week of extra vacation, or a $500-$1,000 bonus at the end of the year?  Or--at the risk of encouraging the caffeine jitters--what about rewarding the worker who recycles the most during the day? It would be hard keeping track of the number of cans and bottles deposited into receptacles at each desk, but you might be able to do something less labor intensive via the buddy system. Each person in the office could be assigned at random another worker to keep an "environmental eye" on, checking in with them monthly to discuss what they've done to make the company greener.

Like most corporate efforts, environmental initiatives can be effectively tied to other training challenges. The contest to come up with innovative ideas is a great exercise in creative thinking, and the green "buddy system" I recommended could be expanded into group efforts to also encourage team building.

The use of your own themes, contests, and training-related tie-ins to encourage office-bound environmentalism means staffers don't have to go out of their way to be green. In the course of just doing their work, they'll slowly metamorphose into green hand puppets--well not exactly, but you may no longer need to pull their strings to get them to separate the trash.