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The Issue  | Avoid & Reduce | Offset
travel to work | travel at work | salary packages | staff action

What's the issue?

There are many hidden emissions associated with staffing and HR policies - generally these emissions revolve around staff travel.  This is an area that many workplaces overlook when addressing the environmental impacts of their operations.

How to avoid and reduce emissions...

Here are some ideas to avoid and reduce emissions.  Check out our sustainable transport guide for businesses for more ideas and inspiration.

Travel to / from work
  • Remote access to workplace systems allows staff to work from their home. This not only helps to reduce the emissions associated with travel to / from the workplace, it can also provide family friendly solutions.
  • Hot desks are desks shared between a number of staff, where those staff don't spend all day every day in the one location.  Hot desks support a more flexible workforce and reduce your physical space requirements - so less area to light, heat, cool, etc.
 image: "University of Queensland Bike Storage Room" 
  • Recruit locally to reduce the distance that staff need to travel to / from work.  Reducing staff travel time can also provide productivity gains as you reduce staff fatigue from long journeys on any form of transport.
  • Provide facilities to encourage staff to walk or cycle to work.  Facilities include secure bike parking, changing rooms and showers, and lockers or cupboards for clothing and other gear.
  • Flexible work hours allow staff to travel outside peak times meaning they don't spend time idling in traffic if they do need to drive to the workplace.  Flexible work hours also help to accommodate the occasional public transport glitch.
Travel during work
  • Encourage staff to travel via public transport to work appointments.  Purchase public transport tickets in advance and make them available from a central location in the workplace, along with timetables, maps and other information to assist with public transport mobility.
  • Car pool to meetings.  Not only will this reduce your emissions, you can also do some pre-meeting planning or discuss other workplace issues while travelling.
  • Consider alternatives to the traditional face-to-face meeting.  Teleconferencing or internetconferencing technologies are now providing viable alternatives to traditional meetings. 
  • Intercall Australia have customised a version of their internet conferencing system for Greenfleet.  The Greenfleet Meeting Centre not only helps you avoid the emissions generated by travel to traditional meetings, an extra tree will be planted for every 3 hours you spend on the system (that's just a one hour meeting between yourself and two other people).
Salary packaging
  • Salary package public transport instead of a vehicle and / or car parking.  Have a few pool cars available for necessary vehicle trips, rather than a car and a car park per person.
  • Provide incentives for the selection of lower emission vehicles if you do salary package vehicles.  These incentives can be financial or benefit based (ie. only provide car parking if a low emission vehicle is selected).
Support staff environmental initiatives
  • Develop a green team for your workplace to drive an environmental program.  These teams work best when there is buy-in and involvement at all levels within your organisation.
  • Allocate time for staff participation in official environmental activities or working groups, rather than expecting them to undertake these activities on top of existing responsibilities.
  • Offer gift matching for donations to environmental charities like Greenfleet.  Ask staff to provide you with a receipt of their donation and then match their donation.
  • Provide an incentive program for staff to reward emission reductions in the workplace.

Offset the rest

It's important that we counteract the impact of the greenhouse emissions we create by undertaking an activity to absorb an equivalent amount of greenhouse gas from the atmosphere.  Greenfleet plants permanent, biodiverse, native forests to offset greenhouse gas emissions on behalf of businesses and individuals.

Use our online Tree Totaller to calculate the emissions generated by your business' car fleet, air travel and on-site energy consumption, then submit your calculations to receive a quote from our business offset managers. 

Encourage your staff to offset their own emissions too - it's income tax deductible.

Or contact one of our business offset managers for assistance.