Happy Becomes Carbon Neutral

I'm delighted that my company Happy has just achieved the status of being Carbon Neutral, based on reducing our energy use - and then offsetting what is left. TrainingZone has asked me to write 10 tips on reducing your company's carbon impact so here they are:

10 Tips for Reducing Your Carbon Impact
We are all aware of the threat of global warning and its easy to feel the problem is too big for us to do anything about it. However all our businesses contribute and we can all do our bit to reduce our carbon impact. The good news is that most of the steps result in lower costs or more engaged staff. Morrisons, for example, has saved £3.4 million a year by reducing its energy use.

1 – Measure It
The first step is to find out what your carbon impact is, and which areas of the business are causing it. We used www.co2balance.com, at very reasonable cost. The Carbon Trust can also be very helpful, often for free.

2 – Turn Equipment Off
A single computer left on permanently can cost over £30 a year. Several dozen left on overnight are not only a waste of energy but a considerable waste of money too, and the cost soon adds up. Ours turn off automatically if not in use. O2 reduced its electricity use by 15% simply by ensuring heating and air conditioning was turned off when buildings were empty.

3 – Install Low Energy Light Bulbs
An old fashioned light bulb can use as much energy as a computer. The easiest way to reduce energy use, and electricity bills, at home is to ensure all your light bulbs are low energy. The same is true at work, though it may be harder work to find the low energy versions. And turn those lights off when not needed.

4 - Source Energy Renewably
One of Dell’s steps to carbon neutrality was to invest directly in wind energy but most of us have to rely on the existing electricity suppliers. All the mainstream companies offer green alternatives, with Scottish and Southern now sourcing 11% from renewable. Then there are specialists like Green Energy, EcoTricity and Good Energy, who are 100% renewable. The cost may be a bit more but as well as getting a warm feeling for doing good, you also avoid the government’s energy tax.

5 - Reduce Car & Aeroplane Use
Encourage car sharing, trains and bicycles. Explore teleconferences instead of air travel. Use the government scheme which provides your staff with new bicycles at up to half price. It doesn’t cost you a penny but does give you the benefit of fitter, healthier staff.

6 – Make Your IT Greener
Data centres and IT generally can be a major part of a company’s energy use. There are complex issues involved, but technology like thin client and virtualisation can have a big impact. Get your techies to check it out .

7 - Set up an Office Recycling and Reuse Scheme
Not just for paper, but also for card, cans, plastic cartons, cups – and also mobile phones and tonner cartridges. And ensure, wherever possible, you buy paper and other products from recycled and sustainable schemes.

8 - Engage Your Staff
Get your people activity involved. Set up green teams to find ways to reduce your energy use. Our Green Group came up with a range of changes. For instance, switching from paper towels to Dyson power dryers saved us £800 a year.

9 - Green your Supply Chain
Work with your suppliers. Simply including a question in your procurement, about carbon reduction plans and offset commitments, will get people thinking about the issues.

10 - Offset What's Left
The above steps will reduce your carbon impact but there will be some left. To be carbon neutral you can offset this by paying for projects which save as much carbon as you use. At Happy we’ve been unofficially doing this by endowing rainforest since 1991. This time we used the www.co2balance.com project Rhino Ark, a conservation charity which helps build energy saving stoves that reduce the need for firewood by 70%. This conserves the woodland and wildlife habitat that live in and around the Aberdale National Park in Kenya.

This will make your company officially Carbon Neutral. As I’ve said its not only good for the planet but it makes business sense. It saves money, increases staff loyalty, gives a positive picture of the business and helps with answering those government procurement questions on your impact on the environment.

Cadbury Does the Right Thing

Congratulations to Cadbury on its decision to make Dairy Milk a fairtrade product. This seems to be a rare but genuine example of a major corporation using its power and influence for positive effect. Chief Executive Todd Stitzer has done well.

Despite loving chocolate, I have not always been a fan of Cadbury. I remember listening to Chairman John Sutherland at a Business in the Community conference some years ago, just after Channel 4 had broadcast a powerful documentary on the role of slavery in chocolate production in the Ivory Coast. The programme had reduced me to tears. I was hopeful that I would hear this corporate giant proclaim that slavery had no place in their industry and they would get the leading companies together to create a programme to outlaw it.

I was to be disappointed. Mr Sutherland chose instead to whine about the role of the media and how consumers might blame Cadbury, even though they sourced very little from the Ivory Coast. For a company that claimed a positive role in society (while selling consumers vast quantities of not very healthy products) it was a truly feeble response.Many companies proclaim their commitment to corporate social responsibility.

However for many it is little more than a marketing gloss. This is obvious in extreme cases like British American Tobacco. BAT has a great community programme but its effect is trivial compared to the devastation wrought by its main product. If BAT had any genuine commitment to society it would at least stop marketing its cigarettes (especially in the third world, where it now focuses most of its pernicious efforts).

Let's hope that Cadbury's decision will be good for sales and will lead other companies to do the right thing. This could be shifting to fair trade products. Or it could be to simply ask the question of what they would do differently if they actually put ethics at the heart of their company.Imagine. Mobile phone companies might give lower rates for customers who hang on to their old models, rather than endlessly persuading them to upgrade. Supermarkets could restrict their special offers to healthy products, rather than 2-for-1 on giant packets of crisps and the like. Electricity companies could do more to help their customers waste energy.

If companies were genuinely committed to social responsibility they would put ethics and values at the heart of their products. It is great to see Cadbury doing just that.

Radical Idea: Don't annoy your customers

Why do some companies have rules that can only annoy their customers? My daughter's phone is with 3 Mobile and is in my name. She is on a £15 a month contract, which includes 600 texts. Seems a lot to me, but not to her. The latest 3 offer is a £15 a month contract with unlimited texts.

So I rang up 3 and asked if we could switch. The answer was, of course, no. The offer was for new customers only. Now this concept has been brilliantly parodied by Mark Benton in the Nationwide adverts. The ads, showing how Nationwide does not have offers for "brand new customers only", are said to have brought them a million new customers.

I asked the two customer service people I talked to from 3 whether they thought it better to follow a strict rule or to make a customer happy. They both laughed and agreed it would be good to make the customer happy. But they weren't allowed to. They weren't even allowed to give me a contact number or email for somebody who might be allowed to.

Why does 3 (and many other mobile companies) do this? The extra cost of the new contract is marginal. Much of that £15 actually goes to subsidising the cost of the phone that came with the contract. But the rule is rigid and you can only have the original deal you signed up to.

I am happy to give 3 a simple idea for their next marketing campaign. Why not offer any customer signing up to them the chance to swap to any other contract of the same monthly cost that comes out over the period of their contract? It would be a simple promise that they value their customers and want to keep them happy. And it would cost very little.

Of course 3 aren't alone here. I could give stories of dreadful recent service from Sony, Virgin and many others. I have a simple principle here: Don't have rigid rules that annoy your customers. One day I hope that won't seem too radical and crazy an idea.

It is good to pay tax

Some years ago my mother was cold called by a financial adviser. The conversation went something like this:

"Hello, can I help you pay less tax", he said
"No, I'm not interested" replied my mum
"No, really, I can save you money" he continued
"No thank you" said my mum
"Please, just give me 10 minutes of your time and I can prove that I can help you pay less tax."
"No, you don't understand" explained my mum. "Its not that I don't believe you. But I'm a socialist and I believe in paying my taxes"
Quick as a flash the adviser came back "Perhaps I can help you pay more taxes?"

My mother declined this kind offer but her attitude, believing paying taxes was part of being a responsibile member of society, is all too rare nowadays.

When we tendered for a new auditor in the summer the main focus (even obsession) of nearly all the accounting firms who presented was how they would help me avoid paying my tax. All I wanted to know who would do my audit best and give good business advice.

Over the last two weeks the Guardian has shown the extent of tax avoidance among the UK's leading companies. Many of these make much of their corporate social responsibility. But theya re exposed here as complete hypocrits. While they spend a few million on the local community, they go to great lengths to avoid paying hundreds of millions, if not billions, in tax.

And you can be sure that the bankers wallowing in their millions in bonuses would have found a hundred-and-one ways to avoid paying the proper level of tax on it.

One of the principle social responsibilities of any business is to pay the tax that enables the health service, the education system, the country's infrastructure and much more besides.

So I hope I can live up to my mother's example. And I hope one day tax avoidance will be as illegal as tax evasion - doing a lot of our leading (and supposedly socially responsible) consutancies out of a major source of business.

Happy Wins Double Gold

Last week was the Institute of IT Training's annual awards. And it was a great night for Happy Computers. We won Gold for IT Training Company of the Year and Gold for IT Trainer of the Year.

Which was fantastic and a complete surprise. We had got Silver in Training Company in 2006, 2007 and 2008 but I wasn't sure it was our year. Apparently the judges were especially impressed by our social responsibility work.

It was great that Ed Lepre won Trainer of the Year. Ed is profoundly deaf and teaches his courses using British Sign Language. He originally joined us on a work experience scheme 3 years ago and has had such dedication to learning and improvement.

Socialise at Work And Get More Done

Should you let your staff spend time at work on social networking? Some recent research suggests that if you don't, your staff may be less committed and effective.

The research was presented at London Business School's Management 2.0 conference last week. Bruce Rayner, of employment benefits company You at Work, found that those staff who spent up to an hour a day on non-work emailing, texting and social messaging were far more committed than those who spent no time on those activities.

Big Issue for Generation Y
And its an especially big issue for Under 25s, the group known as Generation Y. The survey found that 33% of this age group were frustrated by employer restrictions over the web (compared to just 9% across all age groups). Over three quarters of under 25s said they were "less likely to leave a company that encourages me to socially interact with colleagues”.

Bruce divided companies into 3 categories: the 'ban-its', the 'agnostics' and the 'embracers', those companies who actively encourage staff to use social networking. He argues: "If employees take a 'social networking' slice out of their day it doesn’t mean the 'value adding' work slice decreases - it means the overall pie increases. Trust is repaid through higher creativity and productivity"

So is your company in the "ban-it" category or are you ready to join the forward-thinking embracers like Cisco, IBM and Microsoft?

Your Manager: Would you prefer supportive or effective?
That was the interesting question put last week at a conference that I was speaking at. They were using voting pads and so we got an instant response. There were 2 sessions, each with about 200 people, but the response was pretty much the same: in the morning 71% went for supportive, and in the afternoon 69%, so overall:

Effective: 30%
Supportive 70%

This was in a regulator body in the health sector, where getting a decision right is important. But people's views were clear. What was most important for managers was to be there for them.

As one participant put it "If they are supportive then we will cover their backs and make sure they look effective. If they aren't supportive, then they are on their own."

Now ideally we are both effective and supportive as managers. But which are you most focused on: being supportive or being effective?