Thinking of reducing unnecessary costs and feeling more wholesome this year? Giving energy preservation a chance is probably the best way to cut some of your biggest workplace costs. To commemorate the Cut Your Energy Cost Day on the 10th of January we have put together a list of 8 best practices and strategies for you to preserve energy at your workplace.

How to preserve energy at your workplace:

Do an energy audit

To get started, you have to know the existing level of energy efficiency at your workplace. An energy audit company or a utility company could do these energy audits for you and advice you on how much energy you must be saving and how.

Manage your lighting

As we all have come to understand, turning off your lights at all times possible is the most basic energy saving practice. However staying in the dark is not an option. So using skylights and windows as much as possible is important. Natural light is also much healthier for your eyes than artificial lighting. If natural lighting does not work for your workplace (due to location etc), LED lights are the best option for you if you’re willing to invest a little more. However if you’re going for affordability, CFL or Compact Fluorescent Lights will do just fine.

Switch to cloud hosting

Statistics show that a small business could save up to 90% of its energy costs by switching to the cloud. According to Gigaom switching to the cloud and getting rid of all physical servers can save around 13 billion USD for your company. Making this transition is 100% worth it. Cloud computing offers many benefits for its users including high scalability and better uptime with no decline in performance. There are many environmentalists who recommend cloud computing for any kind of company or organization.

Take power management seriously

Make it a point to not abuse the privilege of having access to technology. Switch off all power consuming equipment when they are not in use. This is a basic practice but a very good one. There are a wide range of power management solutions that you can choose from to help you keep track of power usage. You can also keep in mind to manually switch hibernation mode on in your computers when they are not being used. Hibernation is much better than putting them on sleep mode as hibernation consumes less power than sleep mode. But you would not lose your current work like you do when you shut it down and start it back up.

Many companies are increasingly switching to solar power as well. However installing this system is costly, but you can definitely add this to your company’s objectives list so that you can switch to solar power as soon as you have the necessary funds to invest in it.

Use energy efficient equipment

Replace your old inefficient equipment with new energy efficient equipment such as CHP (Combined Heat and Power) equipment and HVAC (Heat, Ventilation and Air-conditioning) equipment.

Reduce paper consumption

With almost everything being digitized today, reducing paper wastage must be the easiest contribution you can make towards energy preservation. However if paper is an absolute necessity for your company it is a clever practice to launch a tree planting campaign and give back to Nature, what you take from it. Not only can this contribute towards energy preservation but it can also boost your corporate image and broaden your involvement in CSR.

Give your employees work from home opportunities

The good thing about this is that not only do your employees get better flexibility in completing work but also you get to save all the energy they would have used up if they were at the workplace. At CloudCone we allow the option of working from home on certain days so that our workstations can have a break ?

Get every employee to brainstorm on more practices and strategies

Be it that you want to integrate green ideologies into your regular workplace or you want to integrate it into your entire brand image and consumer experience, the best way to come up with the comprehensive knowledge and the diverse creativity needed for it is to consult your employees. You can initiate or propose the practice where every employee from every division of your company gets the chance to contribute their ideas for preservation of energy. You can implement this through company-wide forums or online forms and select the best ideas to practice.

It’s wonderful that being green and preserving energy is a trend today. It shows us how far businesses have come from their origins. To give back to Nature and our environment is not only great but also stimulating and inspiring for anyone; not only to those who initiate these ventures but also for those who watch and observe them. So who will you inspire today? Preserve energy, go green.