Posts Tagged ‘Environment’

In the previous post I discussed one problem with giant solar farms. On the surface they appear to be a great idea. Who wouldn’t want to create energy cleanly from the sun?

Unfortunately, there are factors involved that we miss – one being the destruction of sensitive ecosystems.

Here’s an excerpt from and article that discusses just such a situation that is occurring out in the Mojave Dessert.

You can read the rest of the article at Time’s Website.

Many benefits to Telecommuting

We’ve talked about benefits of telecommuting and some employment positions (such as call center staff) that might make a good fit.

From previous discussions, we know that the organization, the employees and the environment all benefit from telecommuting – so what’s holding us back from using it more?

One possible factor is the need for keeping employees and teams up to date with meetings. After all, there is a time when face to face meetings convey a message much more clearly than a conference call or an email.

That makes sense, but it doesn’t mean that an employee has to be available for one hundred percent of the work week.

Let’s look at our call center again as an example. An organization could divide its call center staff into five teams. Each team would physically commute to the office one day per week. The other four days each week they would telecommute.

The company would then only have to maintain facilities to accommodate 1/5 of its call center staff. They could schedule their various meetings for this one day.

Scheduling Meetings Still Works

The result; the employees would have to deal with 1/5th of the stress and expense of commuting. The organization would have its facilities expenses reduced. Most importantly, the environment would have 1/5th of the impact on it from commuters.

Of course this is just one possible scenario. It might make sense to have an employee on site 2 days per week, or only once every two weeks. Organizations and employees would have to plan out what mix of on and off site time would work best for them. It might even take some experimentation to find the right mix.

The key to remember is that there is less need than ever for employees to be physically located at a central site. With a few small changes in how we manage our businesses, we can start seeing significant benefits, especially the environment.

As usual, I would love to hear your thoughts on the topic. Please leave a comment.

When we talk about the environment, It’s easy enough to point to the large corporate polluters and demand that they change. We often hear that we need more legislation, that we need more enforcement, and that we need more penalties.

I would suggest that forcing others to comply rarely produces the results that we desire.

A more effective approach might be for each of us to start taking personal responsibility. That’s something that we don’t like to do in our society. We want others to change, but we don’t like to have our own life impacted.

The truth is, the changes in our environment as a result of pollution are going to change our lifestyles whether we actively participate or not – the smog in the air, the waste in the landfill, the chemicals in our water. Each of these will impact the quality of our lives in same way.

What we can do is make small changes to reduce our impact on our surroundings. As a result of this, our surroundings will have less of an impact on us.

Once we begin to make those small changes we will start to see benefits, and be encouraged by them. Our enthusiasm will increase and we will be sharing our successes with our friends and relatives. We will let them know how we are making a difference, and they can easily do so too.

Finally, we can start talking on those big polluters – those corporations and those government agencies that are knowingly destroying our surroundings. It may not be an easy battle. It may take time for them to realize that poisoning our environments affects them just as much as it affects us. It may take letter campaigns, boycotts, and legislation to bring about change. But let’s not allow the big polluters dictate our personal actions. Let’s take action now on what are able to, and pursue the large polluters as we are able to.

If we all take personal responsibility and start making small changes, it will have a huge impact on the destruction of our environment.