We are looking at sustainable business design. We want to be sure we are doing the right things in the new Saasu offices in the Sydney CBD, Australia. The offices will house labs, accounts and operations.

The work environment and how we work in it is one of the biggest sustainability factors we will face. However, it is second only to the impact we have at a global level by selling an environmentally sustainable product such as the Saasu web finance engine.

If Saasu prevents thousands of old style software licenses from being sold then we can facilitate behavioural change in the workplace that has a positive impact on the environment. Scanning instead of photocopying, emailing instead of mailing and signing in to the website instead of manufacturing CD’s and paper help manuals. The list goes on and on. This has a potential impact of saving thousands of trees, reducing energy consumption and many other ecological knock-ons.

Indirectly teaching thousands of people to do their work in a different way through SaaS technology helps humans achieve sustainable business practices and save money doing it!

Do you want a paper based help manual or a living tree as your legacy?

It’s your choice when you decide how and what you buy. That is the power of those who can and want to help by carrying and using a “green wallet” as we call it here at Saasu.

Aspects to be explored include; Ethical, sustainable, visually appealing, human habitable, brand building, a great vibe.

Our Eco List

Efficient use of resources

• Scan it, don’t copy it – Create procedures which lead to scanning being the preferred option but still allow for copying. Let’s be realistic.
• Less paper – but not paperless. Again, let’s be realistic:
  • 100% recycled and not heavily bleached – Look into the production cycle for the paper if you can.
  • Review you printer and their sources – We currently source from Whirlwind Print
  • Keep marketing collateral to a page or two at the most – Re-design layouts by collapsing the content into simple, tightly designed material.
• No paper help manuals – paper presentations or otherwise are not offered to customers or prospects unless specifically requested.

Effective use of technology

• Subscribe to online services (SaaS) – Don’t buy boxed software! It has loads of paper manuals, cardboard dividers, plastic wrap. Producing it costs the environment a small carbon fortune.
  We love SaaS and don’t have to make any “green” apologies for it:
  • Accounting – Saasu.com (plug)
  • Spreadys, Presos and Docs – Google Apps
  • Email – Gmail
  • Email Sending – Campaign Monitor
  • Service Tracking – Trac
  • Stock Photo’s – iStockPhoto.com
• IP phones (VoIP) using existing internet infrastructure – Save installing and maintaining additional phone lines and services. We believe that if we aren’t using surplus capacity net energy cost could actually be higher with VoIP so think carefully about this one. We like the Philips VoIP 321
• Fax to PC – Prevent the need to buy Fax machines and reduces phone line burdens. We use Mbox
• Voice mail to PC – prevent the need to buy Voice mail telco infrastructure.
• Downloads in lieu of paper – bank, credit card and some supplier paper statements are no longer necessary.

Saasu Green Web Finance Engine

• Email invoices – increases cash flow velocity which improves economic efficiency. Reduces mail and paper burden.
• Direct bank payments – less paperwork, easy to PDF or save as a file (saves scanning and printing).
• Email payslips – save mail (fuel/capital), paper and preparation labour
• Online time sheeting – saves faxes, paper and labour duplication.
• Single data source efficiency – Duplication costs the environment. Having a single data source can create efficiencies in communication, report printing, backups, and other aspects.

SOHO’s and Telecommuting

• Long term sea change – SaaS improves businesses connectivity to the city.
• Lower transport consumption – SaaS enables work from home online.
• Virtual Services – Saasu enables disabled bookkeepers to work without travel, web developers, secretaries and accountants can provide virtual services. They can service customer from their SOHO and reduce travel consumption and infrastructure requirements.
• Centralised Infrastructure – In organisations like Saasu we need to look at the trade off that exists between additional infrastructure costs required for staff to work from home versus centralised infrastructure in an office. For example every home office needs a printer but the office can have everyone share one. Also the shared heating and lighting can create a net gain. Heating 100 employees in an office is cheaper than heating 100 separate houses or even the occupied rooms in those houses. These are the negatives that are sometimes forgotten in the Telecommuting equation. In short it isn’t clear without proper analysis on a business by business basis. Even then you need to analyse your logistics, procurement and sales impacts based on the SOHO worker versus the in-office worker.
• Centralising people around an intermodel public transport – this is clearly a plus of CBD locations which tend to have everyone use public transport. Our old location wasn’t as convenient so there was more drive to work employees.
• Office versus SOHO productivity has an environmental impact – consider productivity trade offs of working from home versus a central office location. For example if you lose 10% productivity across each employee then you have to look at the cost of this from a financial and an environmental perspective. A 20% loss in customer sales? Expending more resource to make up the shortfall in productivity? Lost sales of your green product or service – an environmental opportunity cost? What’s the net result? It’s never as simple as saying I helped the environment by working from home. 1st degree analysis is nearly always wrong in observing these environmental impact situations.
• Discourage Driving – Not providing car spaces helps, make employees pay if they want a car space.
• Office Bikes – Quick, cheap, and helps your staff get fit. Supply helmets!

Saasu’s Green Investments

• Banking Green – We lend our cash surplus to the worlds greenest bank Westpac Bank
• Green Investment – Saasu is an investor in the soon to be launched Carbon Offset broker/arranger Iceus

Maximise natural light in your office

• Remove walls and use glass – Glass is expensive to produce in terms of energy but the life span savings are significant when it comes to decreasing the artificial light burden and reducing future waste by building with recyclable materials.
• Light colour pallet advantage – Paint white walls and ceilings or in very light colours. Using colour for feature walls only means less pigments/dies are used and it intensifies the available natural light.
• Reflective surfaces can help intensify natural light – Glass, aluminium and stainless steel surfaces are some examples.
• Presence sensitive lights in lift areas – They’re off until someone comes out of the lift.

Scrubbing our air

• Plants – preferably edible ones like chilli’s, herbs and the like that we can put in our Laksa’s!
• Access to air – our balcony, employees can get some chill time in Hyde Park on their laptops.
• Ozone – Using the photocopier less will mean less stinking ozone particles.
• No smoking – Definitely a no even in outdoor public areas.

Making sure you have a Green Wallet

• Know your footprint and know what it costs to clean it – We are calculating footprint in consideration of buying carbon credits with proceeds from subscriptions to offset energy used by our servers for the life of the subscription.
• Green buying – Use portals like the soon to be released Iceus (plug) to track our footprint and buy green consumables
• Recycled buying – recycled papers, print cartridges.
• Glass and aluminium for in house drinks – In house drinks should all be bought in aluminium or glass preferably as they have the highest probability of being recycled.
• Communal Media consumables – Magazines, newspaper and journals to be kept in common areas. Decline free publications where online version exists.

Kitchen and bathrooms

• Washable towels – instead of paper kitchen towels.
• Speciality or heritage dish – have a weekly or monthly turn by each person in you team make their speciality or heritage dish. It saves you consuming takeaway containers (saves time and money – food production in bulk). Helps you get in touch with what they eat, who they are. Food is an important part of community. Kas, one of our coders makes an awesome chicken curry with sambal (fried onion and chilli). Rips ya lips off!
• No plastic utensils – no plastic cups, bags, cutlery.
• Comfortable breakout area – time away from the screens is an essential mind refresh.
• Get photos of where you drains go – photos of North Head and Bondi where our local outfalls are can be placed directly above the kitchen sink so no-one is tempted to drain anything that shouldn’t be.
• No instant boil devices – keeping water hot for convenience is a luxury unless you have a very high turnover kitchen. It also wastes electricity overnight so if you need to use this method put it on a timer.
• Kitchen sink drain trap – sounds obvious but they only seem to be in houses I’ve noticed.
• Green cleaning products – make sure our detergents and cleaning liquids are eco-friendly. Orange oil spray is a great one I personally love.

Eco friendly Office Equipment

• Energy Efficiency – consider energy used by computers bought. Reduce consumption rate by buying memory and not upgrading quite as often. Better to have one big 24inch screen than a couple of smaller screens. Net energy consumption should be lower (in theory). Review electric goods energy consumption before purchase.
• Scanners instead of printers – keeping with our SaaS philosophy of no-paperwork.
• Old Computer Recycling – computers are only entering their second life when they become second hand. Check out one of our customer who redistributes PC’s to offshore.
• Avoid Batteries – Our new Macs and PC’s are mouses still with their tails! Wireless mouses require batteries which is a higher cost on the environment.
• Devices on Standby – many don’t need to be such as shredders, permanent hot water boilers and photocopy machines. If you need it a lot your paper practices aren’t great, your scanner is what should be on standby!

Sustainable Office furnishings

• Glass Top Desks – Reduce wastage and asset depreciation dollars. Achieve longer lifespan and total cost of ownership. Glass dates less than other materials and can be re buffed to revamp it. Even though it has high energy consumption in production when you look at it from a life cost perspective it is quite good.
• Furniture Mobility – everything is on castor’s to allow for ease of movement and office redesign without knocking down and replacing walls.
• Minimise Ducting – wall or wireless internet connections and low cable PC/Mac options.

Recycling

• Obvious Candidates – Paper, glass and aluminium cans
• Recycling Food Waste – An in office worm farm (Digital Eskimo’s suggestion – cool idea guys!). Remember don’t feed them meat, worms are vegetarians.
• Mixed Recyclables Bin – For broken PC’s, old mobiles, printer cartridges and batteries as examples. Have a procedure for clearing the decks of these things once a month.
• Non-current PC’s – give them to Surplus Remarketers and they will ensure they are sold or recycled to reduce landfill. We love this companies idea.
• No under desk bins – they tend to collect mixed rubbish from lazy people!

Eco-behaviour

• Empower you staff to come up with green ideas – Give your staff a gift, or an early mark for coming up with an idea that adds sustainability to your office.
• Green Corporate Gifts – Emails instead of cards, corporate worm wee (idea from Digital Eskimo), donate to charity in lieu of gifts.
• Green Conference Locations – Choose conference locations based on the venues environmental track record.
• Beat Your Green Chest – Tell our peers and customers about our sustainable office practices so they catch the sustainable bug.
• Banned Products List – Make sure that you have a banned products list.

Sustainable is not possible without a sound Mind and body

• Mental sustainability – Place to have an evening staff or client drink (I like the closing scene in Boston Legal).
• I See Green – Proven to be calming and have good associations. Green plants, flowers or in our case a nice outlook onto the Sydney CBD’s Hyde Park should do the trick.
• Pet fish in the Office – They are soothing but get some native fish – Rainbows, Barramundi or Australian perch and no foreign species water plants.
• Contagious but not too sick to work – It’s easy to work from home when still a little sick or contagious when you operate a SaaS based business infrastructure.
• Create a Micro Sea Change – Stress leave can be reduced if you can offer up work from home when people are getting tense in the office environment. It’s better to say. Look spend a week working from home than to say spend a week not working.

Eco-Culture

• Ethical Attitudes – They will usually lead to environmentally sustainable ones.
• Balanced Lifestyle – Encourage a work and home life balance. See The Calm Space for inspiration.
• Green Culture – Constantly thinking and doing green.
• Exercise culture – This will tend to divert people into healthier eating and general lifestyle choices which have so many parallels with sustainability
• Culture of Re-use – Writing on the back of used paper, re-using boxes for storage, re-using manila folders etc. Non confidential printed paper can be used at home for the kids to draw on. See the post I wrote on WWF’s FutureMakers.com website

Office Life

• Use that Hot Server Air – duct hot air from server rooms into main premises during winter to reduce heating load
• Air conditioning as a last resort – I admit in our office that we have limited control as we occupy one floor of the building
• Who’s turning the lights off – when you go home does the last person turn them off?
• Power Save Mode – Turn on the power save feature on your computers

Sustaining sustainability – leveraging and improving sustainability

• Environmental Officer – Make sure you appoint an environmental officer
• Triple Bottom Line – Track and record your footprint, get rated and improve from your baseline.

Learn and Contribute to the Global Green Knowledge Base

Keep researching new ideas, use your blog, share your ideas, create conversations which will generate IP that will help the environment for all. Try these websites to get yourself in the mood;

• Future Makers
• Synapse Chronicles
• Inhabitant
• EcoGeek.com
• WWF

Credit to Grant Young who has always been an environmental inspiration to our company.