HOW TO BE ENVIRONMENTALLY SUSTAINABLE WITH THESE 3 SIMPLE STEPS

Three steps to begin ISO 14001 environmental management systems, if you're someone who knows that you're committed to and convinced that you can make some small improvements in your organization to improve your organization's environmental impact, your organization's environmental performance. I'm going to show you how you might be able to identify that there are some financial incentives and some financial benefits and how you can go about three simple steps to get environmental programs running in your organization.

If you're a beginner and you want to just get started and just simply understand what the three tips are in terms of getting started with an environmental management system that marries up or complies with ISO 14001 stay you’re in the right place.

Three steps to begin with ISO 14001 or an environmental management system.

1. Tip number one is doing a Google search or trying to understand or getting an understanding of what are the environmental issues for your industry. One of the most successful starting points that I've seen across thousands of organizations is a simple Google search; the top 10 environmental issues for your industry, from road-building, civil, construction, mining, pipe laying, pipe building, a customer service organization, banking, the top environmental issues for those organizations and that's going to start to unpack a theme. Now in the past, I've seen people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to consultants to identify these issues, now you can do it for free in five minutes with a simple Google search. You might start to build an environmental risk register in some sort of spreadsheet, but at least getting it down as a list on a notepad, it's going to be simple to identify what other people have done, what other issues there might be, but also, it's going to give you an idea of what doesn't apply to your organization, the environmental issue that might not be relevant for you, but it might be important for your customers or it might be important for your suppliers. Be mindful of that when an issue comes up, an environmental issue comes up from that Google search and ask yourself, is relevant to your industry? can you facilitate better environmental impacts for your customers? Because if you can have a better customer experience, that's going to be good for everybody. So have a think about that, so step one is what environmental issues does our industry have that moves through to step two.

2. What programs, what small little programs could we implement in our organization to improve that issue or to prevent that issue in our organization. Now it's important at this point to get your team together, get people together that a part of the business. Maybe it's a bit of you consulting or going around and having conversations with people about what small things could we do to prevent or improve this environmental issue. As you start to note that down, they're going to be your little environmental programs. Keep it simple and maybe just a short list of things that yes, we can do. A few little things now to try and prevent that but in the long term, we could do some bigger projects in terms of what we can do to improve environmental issues. You may find that that's going to have a positive impact on the profitability of your business by minimizing costs and what that's going to look like maybe some programs or plans, maybe a little environmental business plan for your organization. Either PowerPoint slides or Google slides, which is your environmental issue, ten little things about what we're doing about each of those issues, who's doing it, how we're going for It.

3. How will you measure your performance over time, what will give you a clear picture of your performance, so for each of those ten issues or five issues or three issues the number of issues that you identified for your organization, how will you track your performance? Can you put it on a graph? Now if you can put it on a graph that would be fantastic and then if you can put that graph on another set of Google slides you've got something to talk about we can report our improvements to our environmental performance.

So now, what you've got at the end of this process, you've got a list of the issues that are relevant to your business, you've got some programs, identified and in a set of Google slides or PowerPoint slides to keep it simple and then you've also got a set of graphs that prove that your environmental performance is improving, that you're saving money, that you're doing great things for the environment.

So those are my three really simple steps in getting going with an environmental management system or an environmental program in your organization. On our website, we have available a checklist that can be downloaded for free which has got questions to ask to do a gap analysis if you like on your organization, work out the holes you need to fill. Hopefully, that has helped you with the simple tips and tricks to make Environmental Management something that's fun and effective in your organization.