It’s a day to get to work – literally.

For years environmental education efforts have focused on schools, parks, and the residential side (e.g., curbside recycling programs) with not as much thought to engaging businesses in environmental issues.

But workplace environmental responsibility is catching on and green businesses are growing. Employees and businesses alike need not wait for a singular day like Earth Day to get started or contribute.

GreenNurture provides the information and tools businesses need in their efforts to make themselves, our communities and our world, more sustainable – every day. For business, this means becoming more efficient and improving the bottom line through both simple and extraordinary actions that our employees suggest and engage in and that take place over time.

Businesses now hold the possibility for being leaders in the world for environmental stewardship. And with the business component more involved in environmental efforts along with traditional players, we stand a much greater chance to improve upon the efforts first envisioned by the creators of Earth Day.

“Low hanging fruit” is a great place for any workplace to start – changing light bulbs to energy-efficient ones, recycling, turning off the faucet. All worthwhile efforts, all contributing to the improved health of our workplaces, planet and environmental education of our world citizenry, but we still have much to do.

Let us not forget that In 1969 Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire from industrial waste and smog blanketed many of our cities. With the first Earth day in the spring of 1970 we saw a call to arms and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Significant strides, but on this 40th Anniversary of Earth Day, in some ways, we may be back where we started, or at least not as far along as we may have hoped.

Similar ongoing issues still need to be addressed:

• Cleanup and Conservation of Water Resources
• Clean Air
• Clean Energy
• Sustainable Development
• Waste Reduction
• Depleted Soils/Sustainable Farming
• Loss of Biological Diversity

May each of us, as employees and citizens of our Earth, feel a renewed connection with our planet and use tools like GreenNurture.com to help us think more innovatively and efficiently. To think long term – transcend dollars and borders — in order to create the world (at home AND work) that our forefathers imagined and our children deserve. Happy Earth Day Co-Workers!

Time to get to work. At work, on our environment, today and every day!

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We’re glad to announce that GreenNurture is the Silver sponsor of the inaugural SmartView™ Sustainable Finance Roundtable in May.

Here are some highlights of that event.

The Roundtable was created by CRD Analytics to spotlight the most innovative and original green ideas or startup companies, and will feature the three winners of the SmartView Eco Entrepreneur Challenge that we promoted earlier this week.

• Three lucky eco entrepreneurs will have the opportunity of making a five-minute pitch to nearly 100 senior finance executives.
• They will be introduced to two conference attendees of their choice.
• They will then join the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) onstage for the NASDAQ MarketSite® Closing Bell ceremony.

More on the event, here.

More details of how to enter, here

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How many do you have lurking in your closet? Your desk? Your junk drawer?

I’m talking about cell phones.

We are inseparable from our cell phones…until the latest and greatest model comes out. Then, we kick the old ones to the curb. “Someday,” you think, “I’ll get around to recycling it.”

The Environmental Protection Agency wants you to know that “someday” is here – and it’s here for a week. The EPA is asking us to recycle our cell phones during the second annual National Cell Phone Recycling Week, April 5 – 11, 2010.

Currently, only about 10 percent of cell phones are recycled. Americans toss 130 million cell phones each year! Each year! If we recycled them, we’d save enough energy to power more than 24,000 homes in a year.

And, if that’s not enough…for every 1 million cell phones recycled, the following can be recovered:

• 75 pounds of gold
• 772 pounds of silver
• 33 pounds of palladium
• 35,274 pounds of copper

Now, multiple those numbers by 130 to reach the 130 million that we toss. Recovering these metals means less mining, less social injustice, less manufacturing leading to less pollution and less depletion of resources.

And, if none of that motivates you, think of this. You’ll reclaim the space in your closet, your desk, or your junk drawer!

• Find a cell phone collection location near you, here at EPA.gov
• Listen to the EPA podcast on this topic
  

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Part 2 of a series on the evolution of the suggestion box. (check part 1 here)

Simple slips of paper put into a box was just the starting point for more advanced suggestion systems. As businesses began to understand the value of employee input, their suggestion systems became more sophisticated.

NCR was one of the first US companies to implement a company-wide suggestion system, under the leadership of its legendary founder, John H. Patterson. Patterson set up a program based on written suggestions for improvement from his factory workers. Patterson believed that the company could be viewed as having a “hundred-headed brain.” In 1894, the employees received $30 for the best ideas and the factory magazine published the names and photos of the winners. By 1897, award amounts grew rapidly to $500 in gold!

Perhaps more importantly, Patterson also worked hard to create a good work environment, pioneering the “daylight” factory (using glass walls) and installing safety devices, ventilation, bathrooms, and lounges. He also subsidized hot meals (which paid for itself with reduced absenteeism), kept medical personnel on-site, provided on-site laundry services, and established a daily period of mandatory exercise. NCR offered extensive night classes on a wide range of subjects (for a mere $1 per class), from mathematics to tool design, and those attending classes became more eligible for advancement. In short, Patterson worked hard to create an environment that lent itself to total employee engagement. And this was more than a century before Google!

Curiously enough, Patterson was also known for his dictatorial style, readily firing employees. Ironically, this side of Patterson accounts for his influence on American business: one estimate concluded that between 1910 and 1930, one-sixth of the nation’s top executives had been trained and fired by Patterson, including his one-time sales manager, Tom Watson, famous for his role in building IBM.

Lincoln Electric Company, a manufacturer of arc-welding supplies and equipment, was another company known for its effective solicitation and implementation of employee input. In 1929, the company instituted a rewards system that compensated employees with half the first year savings of any improvement idea. But this rewards system was only the tip of the iceberg of Lincoln’s employee suggestion/engagement system. Fifty percent of the company’s stock was owned by seventy per cent of the employees.

There was little distinction between management and employees in terms of compensation and offices. There were specific processes for communication between management and labor. Employee bonuses, based on a variety of factors, often approximated an employee’s annual wages. Indeed, in 1946, while Lincoln boasted that its wage rates “were higher than those in any other manufacturing activity in the world,” it had the lowest labor costs per dollar of sales than any other company in its industry.

James T. Lincoln, the founder, provided one of the earliest articulations of why  suggestions and employee engagement systems are so necessary in his Lincoln’s Incentive System, published in 1946:

“Management, if it is to be the best obtainable, must be the collective intelligence of the whole organization. No one man, or even a small group of men, can have sufficient knowledge, experience, and wisdom to make decisions that can be as sound as they would be if these decisions represented the collective intelligence and experience of the group. The problem is to get this collective intelligence and experience to bear on decisions as they are made.”

More than 60 years later, the terms “collective intelligence” (and its cousin “crowdsourcing”) have become new buzz words, and, in 2006, MIT created the Center for Collective Intelligence.Hungry for feedback and intelligence, business are turning to social media applications for this.

Next: Today’s Idea Management Systems

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As part of our series of ‘Slidecasts‘  here is our take on the ‘climate-gate’ affair.

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