Whether you own a small business or a huge corporation, this article gives some easy advice on how to go green in your office by considering your paper use. Start by educating your employees and co-workers that being a paper pig is not cool.

Key tricks to changing our company-wide habits revolve around finding the “Paper Pigs” in your company. These are the people that love to print things a bazillion times while revising, keep copies for their records, and distribute memos the old fashioned way by setting them on your office chair. Paper Pigs can be spotted very easily. Just cruise your office looking for the desks with the mounds of paper on them, the people that have to have a bunch of file cabinets, or how much time they spend sitting by the printers and copy machine.

Patterns are hard to miss, but a real dead giveaway is that Paper Pig that put a copy of something right on your chair that could have been emailed. This is when it’s good to have a quick conversation about paper etiquette in the new business world. Some people are not receptive to suggestions and will feel threatened if you confront them directly. Another more discreet way to confront a group of Paper Pigs is by holding a “Go Green Meeting”.

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Here are some general tips for a productive “Go Green Meeting”:

  1. Invite people who are not Paper Pigs to the meeting. Look for the greenest of them all among your workforce as they are likely to have an opinion about how business is being conducted.

  2. Start out the meeting by discussing the need to move to a greener way of doing business. Try to make your introduction to the meeting about bringing our heads together to think of a better way. Emphasize the savings to the business.

  3. Offer a prize to the best green idea that saves the company the most money. This can incite a healthy competition… especially if the prize is really cool.

  4. Ask for thoughts about how the business could improve. This should spark a heated discussion from those that are eco-conscious which will hopefully help to soften the blows to the Paper Pigs with a bit of peer pressure.

  5. Pick easy ways that were mentioned in the meeting and decide upon an action plan to act upon them. Quick wins are always the best, but keep your goals in the long term. This will give the attendees of the meeting faith that the meeting may not have actually been in vain like so many meetings are today.

It’s better just to not be a Paper Pig in the first place, but sadly many of these people are from previous generations when trees were much more abundant. Leading by example is not always enough for these oldies but goodies. However, there are many younger people who have picked up the nasty habit of using too much paper. Those are the people that can be rehabilitated much more easily by encouragement from the business. Even the older Paper Pigs will have to follow suit if it’s a corporate “mandate”.