Typically, Green Teams consists of a voluntary group of employees that are dedicated to supporting waste reduction, recycling,

and responsible purchasing of items such as light bulbs and paper. In the eBay example, a Green Team tested a sustainable innovative product design. Whatever your goals, here are some important steps to consider when establishing a Green Team at your company.

Source: http://ow.ly/5YiZZ – For eBay box

http://ow.ly/5Yjaz – for What is a Green Team

How do You Build a Successful Green Team Within an Organization?

·Strong Executive Support – The company must believe in the ideas that the Green Team puts forth, take it seriously and initiate it in a proper manner. The executive support validates the importance of team work within the organization and helps to prioritize and remove obstacles.

·Align Green Team Goals With Sustainability Goals of Company – This is significant because Green Teams won’t receive support if they are taking their goals in a different direction then the company’s goals.

·Foster Diversity Amongst Team Members – Choose representatives from different business units, department levels and cultures in order to provide varied perspectives and insights along with new ideas. Having management, administrative assistants, with IT and housekeeping as team members can give everyone the ability to contribute and become unique assets.

·Keep Teams Fresh – Move around positions of leadership among different people to create new opportunities for leaders and ideas.

Source: Webinar Powerpoint Slide #14

How do You Make Sure That Launching The Green Team Goes Smoothly?

·Appoint One or Two Team Leaders –Leaders should be committed to the program so they can manage the Green Team, oversee programs, and act as a liaison between management, maintenance staff, employees, and recycling vendors.

·Hold Meetings Consistently (Every Two Weeks Seems to Work Great) – The meeting should help to set up a basic program and discuss how to best implement this program. The team should make decisions and split up tasks.

·Come up with Project Ideas as a Team – The team should then come up with project ideas that can range from deciding what exactly to recycle, to deciding whether solar panels would be a worthy investment for the company.

·Create systems For Measuring And Tracking Initiatives – Technology and software tools are available today to help keep track of your progress and prove the worth of investment resources (i.e. http://www.Angelpoints.com).

Source: http://ow.ly/5Yj51

Benefits of The Green Team

Green Teams can have a profound effect in an organization, and for the planet. Shoshannah Lenski, from the Boston Consultancy office, found that 75% of surveyed employees thought that becoming environmentally conscious within a company was significant to morale, talent retention, and recruiting. This means that employee retention and engagement goes up by merely becoming greener! It also is critical in professional development. Clorox’s Suzanne Henricksen said her experience in managing a workplace change project was instrumental to her development of leadership skills.

The most evident benefit in establishing a Green Team comes from the reduction of costs and the environmental impact. Becoming efficient and sustainable pays off in the long run (http://ow.ly/5Yj7S), because it saves energy and conserves resources. Betsy Hansen, a Senior Marketing Manager at Sun Microsystems, decided to eliminate one printed direct mail piece, which saved the company 4.63 tons of paper along with thousands of dollars. This can lead to an enhancement of brand reputation and profitability because consumers are more willing to buy from a company that shares similar values as them. In eBay’s case, the work of their Green Team led to product innovation and increased customer satisfaction.

Source: Webinar Powerpoint: Slide #7

Conclusion

A Green Team is an excellent resource to gain a step ahead of the competition for companies moving towards sustainability. Employees will be willing to volunteer their time to move towards a greener company the majority of the time as long as the executives seem like they are encouraging it, and thus management should push the concept. If an organization uses these tips as guides to initiate and run the Green Team, the company may see very positive changes towards creating a green future.

Tossed together were investors, large-company executives and start-up entrepreneurs, all in search of the best technology ideas. I can’t capture it all here. We talked gaming, gadgets, security, social, mobile, media, clouds, commerce, and much more. Here are three new companies that stood out for me and epitomized the spirit of innovation I found there:

1. Sound Cloud – youtube for sounds.
2. Clever Sense – pandora for everything except music
3. Lytro – a camera that lets you take a shot and then, with ease, re-focus any part of the shot and create 3-D perspective. You could hear the “ooohs” and “ahhhs” during that demo.

On the final evening, two beers into a reception surrounded by blue-maroon peaks and lavender, our host greeted us with what felt something like a challenge. “You are change agents,” she said. “You have the unique ability to change the world.” Standing there at the height of dusk, shoulder to shoulder with some of the brightest entrepreneurs on the planet, it was hard not to feel like the possibilities were endless.

But here lies the rub. During two full days of seeing the coolest apps, games and devices under the sun, I can’t recall one panel discussion or demo focused on this goal. I kept waiting for it. Instead, there was this recurring theme, playing over and over again: “we make the coolest stuff, which will make a ton of money, which we’ll use to make cooler stuff that will beat our competitors, which will make us even more money.” Coolness and riches reverberated through the hills like the sound of music. It was fun and addictive, but it was, in a sense, just hurling pigs at birds.

I found myself wanting more. Couldn’t PhDs who had locked themselves in rooms for two years dreaming up ideas come up with ones that would inspire us and make the world better while making bundles of cash? The answer had to be “yes.”

“Hey,” I said to the CTO of Clever Sense, “what about using your app to serve up causes that match peoples’ tastes as seamlessly as Pandora serves up their favorite tunes?” “We could do that,” he said with genuine interest. To the hip, boyish founder of Sound Cloud I asked, “Could you guys crowd-source every bird call and capture the voices of refugees?” “Yes!” he declared, a grin revealing every one of his teeth.

These were change makers to be sure, and yet the whole conference seemed stuck in a two-dimensional world of coolness and wealth, when it could have achieved 3D vibrancy simply by adding the dimension of social consciousness. (In this regard, Katzenberg was both there and not there.) Fusing strong business models with strong social missions is one of the most important innovations in business today and companies young and old must explore this dimension if they hope to become and stay great.

Next year, I would like to lead a panel of three innovators who use their technology to address social issues that they are uniquely positioned to address. The questions I will ask are: 1) what issue(s) are you addressing? 2) how do you measure your social impact? and 3) how does your social mission affect your brand and your culture? I expect it will be a lively and inspiring conversation. I cannot wait.

Fortunately, I was wrong. The article argues the same point that we have been making for years to our clients, namely that “traditional corporate social responsibility programs and corporate philanthropy aim primarily to produce a social benefit and that any profits that may materialize are byproducts.” This is true. We recently surveyed over 100 companies and found that only 8 of them thought about profits when creating their social responsibility programs. I am constantly amazed by how sheepish our clients are about seeking out or stating clearly the financial benefits associated with their corporate responsibility initiatives. This is clearly a problem to fix.

If you read the Report about which the article was written, a short 14-pager that can be digested in about 5 minutes, you’ll see three key points:

• “Executives targeting profitability…will generate social benefits more efficiently and sustainably than those using typical strategies for CSR.”
• “Private benefits [i.e., profits] generated by investments that create social benefits can be very large, and so considering them may be as worthy of executives’ time as other parts of their companies’ operations.”
• “[Focus] on the single bottom line does not imply that companies’ involvement in activities that create social benefits will diminish. On the contrary, we argue that these activities will become more common as companies make a case for them in terms of the single bottom line.”

The authors correctly contend that, with respect to how they calculate social investments, most companies solve for Y, where Y equals social outcomes, when they should be solving for X, where X equals financial outcomes. Solving for X would allow these companies to make smarter and perhaps bigger social investments, thereby increasing Y.
The best example of a company that nails this proposition is Toms (http://www.toms.com/). If you listen to Toms CEO and Founder, Blake Mycoskie, you’ll hear an inspiring story about how he started the company with no business plan and only the desire to help others. On the surface, he’s the opposite of the proverbial billiard player in Friedman’s work, who makes “his shots as if he knew the complicated mathematical formulas that would give the optimal directions of travel.” Listening to Mycoskie, you’d think he didn’t care where the eight ball ended up. But semantics aside, here’s a company that has generated enormous profit and shareholder value by making investments that create social benefits, exactly what the Times report advocates. Moreover, the company’s soaring profitability is the critical factor in its ability to increase its investments in social benefits, as evidenced by their new commitment to cure lost vision in developing countries by selling great-looking sunglasses. If investments in social benefit don’t create profit now or down the road, they should surely be scrapped; otherwise, they are detracting from a company’s long-term viability. How can anyone’s math refute this? Conversely, investments in social benefit that create enormous profit, like Toms, should be heralded as great business innovations and examples of corporate leadership for others to emulate.

What the authors of the report neglect to identify, in my opinion, is the profit multiplier effect that companies can create when they identify their own Toms opportunity. They touch briefly on the importance of aligning social mission with business model in a compelling way, when, for example, they say “a mining company would probably be better off training workers who could contribute to its supply chain than managing a primary school,” but they don’t go nearly far enough. The important observation for executives is that finding their Toms opportunity is about aligning mission and model in such a way as to make them profitable, exciting and inseparable. Like two sides of a coin, mission and model create value together. Without both, the value is dimished. When both are in perfect harmony, employees and customers sing your praises and customers and investors literally throw money at your company. I’d venture that today 99% of CSR programs do not accomplish this. Granted it may not always be easy to do — what should Altria do? — but when done right it can create much higher return for shareholders, because of the multiplier effect, than most any other investment the company can make.

When a company makes an investment that generates high social benefit, high revenue and high employee morale all at the same time, that’s called hitting the jackpot. What the smartest CSR leaders should be seeking is to hit this jackpot by uncovering their Toms opportunities. If they do, they will not only generate huge profits and solve important social needs, but they may just find themselves in succession to become the next CEO. If you’re interested in doing this, please let me know and we’ll help.

Andy Mercy, CEO

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AngelPoints is where personal responsibility meets corporate strategy. Since 2001, AngelPoints has helped leading companies in every industry around the globe manage and measure the impact of their CSR and sustainability initiatives.

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The Tom’s Shoe Moment finds its roots in our country’s unique brand of social responsibility that De Tocqueville first identified in the late 19^th century. Most recently, it is borne out of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement, which strives to align business objectives with social and environmental objectives in order to create new business opportunity. I’d say it’s the culmination of this effort, in fact, moving from alignment to total integration, as has been achieved by the Tom’s Shoe company. If you’re not familiar with Tom’s, check them out. They are growing fast, with a tribe of fanatical customers and employees that think of their mission and (business) model as inseparable truths. Their “One for One” model means that with every pair of shoes they sell, they give one to a child in need. It’s simple and clear and the company has out-innovated its competitors with this innovation. Never before has the opportunity for this type of innovation been greater. There is no denying that a tipping point has been reached in the psyche of the American consumer, investor and employee that makes this innovation possible.

If I were part of the Obama administration, hoping to out-innovate while ushering in the “new era of responsibility” that he so eloquently summoned in his inaugural address, I would take a close look at this model and think about how to incentivize more businesses to shift towards it, as well as how to export it for the world to follow. As it now stands, far too large a chunk of federal investments goes towards strategies that don’t support this type of innovation. I believe the President cannot execute on his promise unless he shifts investments towards programs that accomplish this type of true innovation. Businesses that start now have the advantage of being able to fuse mission and model from the very beginning. Companies that have legacy models will take time to evolve and would benefit from help.

When it comes to out-educating, I think we should look to this same tradition for a clue. As a parent of three, I have seen first-hand what bands of volunteers can do for a public school. They instruct, fundraise, feed, make safe and generally help the place hum. Our budget-starved public elementary school wouldn’t be half the place it is were it not for our volunteers. The problem for many schools, particularly in our inner-cities, is that parents don’t have the time to volunteer frequently because they work so hard. I see an opportunity for the retiring boomer generation to fill this void and make an enormous difference in our public schools. Policy should support this strategy by offering these boomers incentives to get involved.

Americans have always loved to band together to help. As the President said in his inaugural speech, the problems we face may be new, but this spirit is old, dating back to our founding fathers. He’d be smart to tap this uniquely American spirit if we are to out-innovate and out-educate for years to come.

- Andy Mercy, CEO

Over 87,000 events created through AngelPoints Enterprise Volunteer Solution (EVS) were analyzed, and it was determined that when a company creates an event without using the event promotion tools available in EVS, 52.1% of the events have participants. In contrast, when a company uses the event promotion functionality of AngelPoints EVS, the participation figure skyrockets to 94.5%. The beauty of the AngelPoints event management tool is that it allows for easy segmentation, deep customization, and powerful deliverability to make sure the event promotion efforts are maximized without requiring a lot of input from the system manager.

This is a great reminder for everyone running an EVP, regardless of what technology you use to manage it: make sure to understand what your technology is capable of. In addition, consider the importance of usability; the easier your technology is to use, the more it will be used, and the more effective your volunteer programs will be. Lastly, when promoting a volunteer event, make sure you understand how to get the right message in front of the right people at the right time.

1. Involving employees in the company’s commitment to become carbon neutral or reduce carbon emissions.
2. Engage employees in reducing waste, saving resources, and living healthy.
3. Rewarding employees who achieve goals that are aligned with the company’s sustainability strategy.

In the words of CEO of Campbells Soup, “to get it right in the marketplace, you need to first get it right in the workplace.” To that end, he tracks two metrics to gauge success: share holder return and employee engagement. The term “employee engagement” is often used loosely, but in this case it is determined consistently from the Q12 Gallop Poll. If you want to measure success, you’ll want to know how you can engage employees better. One sure fire way to do so is to increase transparency…there can’t be a disconnect between what employees do day to day, and what green teams are involved in. Create activities to get employees involved in volunteering, and let the employees connect the dots between their activities volunteering and the broader company strategy.