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Make your office smarter

Make your office smarter

Our Smart Office Handbook is a practical guide to making your office and workplace more sustainable and eco-friendly. The toolkit below includes the handbook and additional resources that you can download.

What’s inside the smart office toolkit?

The handbook provides a practical step-by-step guide to greening your office.

The focus areas include:

  • Eco-procurement
  • Energy efficiency
  • Environmental impact
  • Social impact
  • Transport
  • Waste reduction
  • Water conservation

Once you have implemented the basics at your office, you might want to consider the next steps along your journey towards a sustainable business and how to extend practices beyond the office.

The toolkit will help you to:

  • Compile an environmental policy and strategy that is relevant to your business and of interest to your clients and stakeholders;
  • Develop a process for implementing a sustainability strategy in the workplace;
  • Explore further options for implementing sustainability through brief introductions to green building and event greening;
  • Identify what you can do at the office;
  • Learn tips for practical things you can do around the office;
  • Plan a successful and cost-effective approach to addressing environmental issues in the workplace; and
  • Understand the impact of your office and business.

How to use the toolkit

Step 1:

  • Get buy-in and explain to the top management team what you would like to do at the office and why it’s important. See the smart office checklist for the process and questions to address.
  • Focus on benefits for the office and what you want to ultimately achieve.
  • Ensure that you get support from different role-players.

Step 2:

  • Do an eco-audit. This scoping audit has been designed to provide you with a general overview of how green your office is currently; to assist with deciding where to start and what to focus on.
  • Identify practical and achievable things you can do to make your office more eco-friendly.

Step 3:

  •  Use the eco-audit to compile a cost-effective strategy or high-level plan to achieve specific long-term environmental goals.
  • Compile an environmental policy to formally commit your organisation’s approach to the environment and sustainability.

Step 4:

  • Develop and implement your action plan. Have a strategy to introduce your plan over time – make sure everyone understands what you’re trying to accomplish.

Step 5:

  • Monitor and review.
  • Monitor your progress and report on results. Re-do the eco-audit at a later date to compare results. Share your results with management to close the loop.

To summarise these steps:

  • Your strategy outlines what needs to be done to implement your policy.
  • Your policy provides the motivation for why you need to do it and sets out your goals.
  • Your action plan provides details on how you will reach your goals.
  •  Monitoring shows your progress

Download the full Smart Office Handbook.

Examples of environmental policies

A policy document should be compact and easy to understand. Try and keep your policy document limited to one page, containing key commitments and guiding principles for implementation. Examples of environmental policies are provided below:

Environmental policy example 1: Quaffee
Environmental policy example 2: McDonald’s
Environmental policy example 3: The Langham Hotel
Environmental policy example 4: Tsogo Sun Group

Examples of action plans

An action plan is a working document that outlines the specific activities that must be done to ensure the environmental policy is implemented. Examples of action plans are provided below:

Action plan example: Club House
Action plan example: Eco Living Centre

Document downloads

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