Sustainability is Much More Than Being Green

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Being sustainable means much more than just being “green” - what ever that means. And the “green” concept certainly varies. Being sustainable in business means that:

  • You look after the environment so that you can continue to run your business without running out of resources, breaching legislation or impairing your neighbour’s environment.
  • You look after your clients so that they continue to buy from and/or recommend you. This is what quality systems are about
  • You look after your people with occupational health and safety and good human resources (I dislike that term because I think people work so much better as a team than as ‘resources’)
  • You look after your finances with increased efficiency
  • You look after your lifestyle by running your business in a way that saves you and your people time and effort.
  • You build in feedback so that you and your people learn from mistakes and continually improve and build your sustainable business.

This is what you can build with simple and well integrated management systems like the ISO series. When these are implemented well and kept simple and practical they are much more than just a tick on the wall or a marketing image. They are a framework to help you build and manage a sustainable business.

Being sustainable also means having the flexibility to change in changing circumstances. One way that businesses are increasing their sustainability is to use new technology like tele and video conferencing rather than flying to meetings. This reduces the time, money and carbon emissions that are so often used to maintain communication and relationships.

There is nothing sustainable about getting up in the morning to catch the 6am flight then doing a full days work in a different city and getting home around 10pm and expecting to be fully productive the next day. Yet this is what we expect our business people and our politicians to do all the time.

The next logical step after tele and video conferencing is to add an online stream to your existing business and this is what I did three years ago with the result that I no longer fly somewhere every week. I now run my consultancy mostly online and it is very effective. This can be highly leveraged so that the both the costs and the time involved is greatly reduced. Surprisingly the technology to do this is not expensive if it is done with thought and planning

Imagine being able to get the background communication and training done predominantly with audio so that you can effectively use the time you spend commuting and still be prepared for online meetings without the need to read mountains of agenda papers. I know many businesses who save lots of time, effort and money to help them build sustainability.

After spending many years helping businesses to become sustainable by analysing their business needs then implementing integrated certified management systems it is exciting to see them begin to develop online systems as well as they become even more sustainable and profitable.

Jean Cannon runs an award winning online business as an energy and sustainability management consultant working with clients around the world.
When she wanted to take her business online to reduce the environmental impact of weekly air travel to clients she found that there was no one program that covered all the information she needed to know to successfully support her clients to the same extent that she did in her traditional consultancy. This resulted large amounts of both lost time and lots of expense as she enrolled in program after program.
As Online Jeanie she pulls all this hard won information into a single program and shares her skills in starting and running a profitable online business with her four module internet training program available from http://www.onlinejeanie.com

Jean is an expert at turning effective offline products and services into digital products and training programs and is generous in the extent that she shares this expertise. And she is able to do this in a very “non-geeky” way with lots of support that anyone is able to follow.

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