What if you could reduce your organization’s carbon footprint by more than 20 percent, lower operational costs, and improve employee retention and satisfaction? Sound too good to be true?
Well, these are just some of the conclusions reached in the report just issued from our Bainbridge Graduate Institute team, titled The Time Clock Revolution. This white paper, the second installment in our 9-month project with BGI, focuses on how applying “Open Work” concepts and other carbon/cost reduction techniques such as conferencing as a replacement for travel, and the amazing benefits that occur both to the enterprise and the environment.
Over the past year, there have been a number of extensive reports by proven sources such as Insight Research, GeSI, the Aspen Institute, and the International Telecommunications Union all coming to same basic conclusion that Information & Communications Technology (ICT) is a huge missed opportunity in our efforts to reduce humanity’s carbon footprint. Simplistically, there are too many buildings and we are moving around too much – which together represent 75% of the carbon output of the U.S. alone.
Insight Research estimates that “green” services in the telecom carrier space alone to be a $256B marketplace by the year 2013, but most carriers are still focused on their own footprints instead of enabling businesses to lower their footprints through proactive use of carrier services such as virtual PBX, unified communications, voice/video/web conferencing, and smart metering or smart grid applications. Our effort with BGI seeks to provide a more “rubber'-hits-the-road” perspective and the end product will be a useful roadmap as to how both telecom carriers and organizations can start putting existing technologies to work in improving productivity, lowering carbon footprints, and overall enterprise expenses.
Some key conclusions of the report: “If every U.S. worker who could telecommute did so 1.6 days per week, 1.35 billion gallons of gasoline would be saved, preventing 26 billion pounds of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere. Add that to the statistics about productivity and it looks pretty compelling to change our commutes from down the interstate to down the hall.” Citing Sun Microsystems leadership in this area: “Sun found that its U.S. employees worked at home an average of 2.1 days per week in 2007. In doing so, they saved an average of $870 per year in gasoline (back when it was just $3.26 a gallon) and around $1,770 dollars in wear and tear on their car (by driving 3,700 fewer commute miles). They were also spared — get this — 104 hours of commute time, which translates to around two and half weeks.”
A big shout out to our BGI team for the great work they continue to deliver amazing work and results: Libby Johnson McKee, Yogi Potzoe, Desiree Rajee, and Manan Shukla – thanks for all your hard work and we are looking forward to the final product and the contribution it will make towards our industry. If you would like a copy of the phase one or phase two reports, please call 866.567.2273, ext. 904.
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