Energy is one of the highest costs that comes with running a business, and to help you lower your bills, we have rounded up the most practical energy saving ideas in the workplace. Aside from employee salaries and benefits, energy costs can also impact your business’s budgets and an overall margin of profits.
Every business owner’s responsibility is to develop practical ways to optimize its spending on utility bills without bottlenecking its productivity and workplace functionality. But the real challenge is inviting everyone in the company to realize optimal energy usage in the workplace.
The energy-saving idea must be easily doable and not bothersome to everyone’s daily routine. And as such, here are some easy ways to save electricity and energy in the workplace to help you reduce your business’ spending.
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Apply Lights-Off Policies
Enforcing a rule that requires lights to be turned off during certain times of the day is one of the easy ways to save electricity in a workplace environment. You can exclude crucial rooms where optimal lighting is necessary from this policy.
Place stickers around light switches in your workplace to remind everyone to turn off lights when the room is vacant or unused. If your workplace has a notice board or project management platforms like Slack or Trello, you should also post the notice there for good measure.
Leverage Natural Lighting
If your business is in a building with great natural lighting, you can leverage that to reduce electricity usage in certain rooms. Encourage your employees to draw up window blinds during bright days and switch to electric lights when it gets too dim for productive work. If you have access to the roof, you can also use solar tubes to channel sunlight as an alternative to electric lamps.
Use Energy-Efficient Light Bulbs
As an additional measure, choosing energy-efficient light bulbs could be another one of the easy ways to save electricity in your workplace. If the natural light in your workplace is not bright enough for a productive and comfortable environment, opting for low-wattage light bulbs is one of the best energy saving ideas in the workplace.
Reduce Air Conditioner and Heater Usage
Lowering the heating and cooling by a few degrees will not impact the comfortable working room too much, but it could reduce your electricity bills significantly. Of course, you should still prioritize your workplace’s comfort to ensure maximum productivity. In winters, set your thermostat several degrees lower because the outside temperature should contribute enough cooling for your workplace. Whereas in hot summers, you can experiment with how much air conditioning your workplace needs to be comfortable enough for productive work without costing too much in electricity.
Create Open Space to Improve Airflow
When the weather is not necessarily too cold or too hot, you can try opening up a few windows and doors to let the fresh air enter your workplace. Generating a stable airflow throughout your work environment could reduce or entirely remove the need for air conditioning during certain days.
Switch to Mobile Devices
If you are still using desktop PCs for your employees, you should consider switching to mobile devices like laptops and tablets. Desktop PCs consume more energy to operate, even without heavy tasks like video rendering or 3D animations. Laptops and tablets require a lot less power to run, and your employees get to move around from their desks should they need to do so. Unless desktop PCs are essential, laptops and tablets are the best device of choice to save on electricity bills.
Turn On Energy Saving Mode on All Devices
Today’s smart devices are more than likely to have energy-saving options to increase their battery life or reduce power consumption. Not only devices like laptops and tablets have energy-saving options, appliances like microwaves, air-conditioners, and fridges often support lower power consumption as well.
You can turn on this feature on all devices in your workplace to optimize power usage and, in turn, lower your electricity bills.
Turn On Hibernate During Lunch Breaks
As another method to reduce excessive power consumption, you can turn on hibernate mode on all of your devices. Hibernating your devices means that when your employees leave for their lunch breaks, their devices will hibernate and therefore consume much less power.
Upgrade to Eco-Friendly Technologies
Some energy-efficient devices and appliances typically cost more upfront but could save you a significant amount of money on electricity bills. Besides its factory-optimized energy efficiency, the key is to maintain and clean your devices and appliances regularly.
Dust buildup is the most common cause of overheating in electronic devices, and routine cleaning could prolong their lifespan and keep the energy efficiency at its best form.
Use Solar Panels
Installing solar panels is also an alternative to reduce electricity bills in the workplace if your office gets plenty of sunlight exposure. With increasing solar panel availability and fiercer competition in the industry, the solar panel installation cost is much lower than a few years ago.
Investing in solar panels could save you a significant amount of money in the long run since it can still generate and store energy even during weekends when your business is not operational.
Encourage Remote Working
Offering remote working opportunities to your employees is another energy saving idea in the workplace that you could use. You can implement several days that your employees can take to do their job remotely, or you can offer certain positions to work entirely from home. It all comes down to how much in-person interaction you want from your employees.
Some companies have implemented work-from-home days where all their staff work remotely on certain days. Work-from-home days could lead to the overall cost reduction from significantly lower power consumption.
Final Thoughts
Saving energy is not only good for your business’s profitability but also provides a positive impact on our environment. And as such, you can encourage your employee to participate in optimizing the power consumption on their daily activity at work. We hope that this article provides some practical energy saving ideas in the workplace for you.
