June 2, 2010 | Jess Sand  | 

If you’ve ever worked as an in-house designer, you know that bureaucracy can be a real pain in the keister. Just try getting co-workers to throw their soda cans in the blue bin, or walk over to the printer to load it with scrap paper, and you’ll quickly realize it takes a lot more than threats to our planetary survival to change our daily work habits. I was reminded of this by an email exchange with one of our readers, in which we were asked to provide some input on how a school might make their paper purchasing more environmentally responsible. It prompted me to pull together a quick guide to implementing a sustainable paper plan in your own office or school.

We could probably write an entire book about implementing sustainable frameworks in the workplace (for detailed information on the ins and outs of choosing paper, be sure to visit our Greener Paper page). In the meantime here’s a quick rundown of how to get your office (or school) on board with your plan:

Keep the goal simple.
If you think you might face resistance at any level, it’s probably best to start small. You’re probably not going to be able to get your boss to run out and buy an $8,000 inkless printer on the fly, so identify a simplified, finite goal that can be tracked and measured (so you’ll know if and when you’ve succeeded). As organizational behavior experts Chip and Dan Heath write in their recent book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, “If people are facing a daunting task, you’ve got to break down the task. Shrink the change.” The authors recommend starting small and allowing early successes (getting people to drop their used paper into the recycling bin instead of the trash, for example) to drive growth of the overall effort, since “big changes come from a succession of small changes.”

Get buy-in.
Start with gaining approval from the big cheese(s), which will ensure you have a top-down mandate to make necessary changes as you go. Remember to speak their language (which may be more about cutting costs, or improving productivity, or building brand equity, than about saving polar bears from melting ice caps). To make sure you’re getting real commitment and not just lip service, ask them to sign something that outlines your general plan—bonus points if you can get them to commit a budget, however small, to the process (again, it helps to speak their language; if your county provides free recycling, for example, then explain how placing a blue bin next to every trash can will reduce garbage disposal costs).

But don’t forget about your co-workers, either. Inviting them to participate in the process will not only increase the likelihood that they’ll actually adopt any agreed-upon changes, you’ll also avoid being christened the office jerkneck. And the more of your co-workers who buy into the plan, the more likely it will be for stragglers and naysayers to get on board.  

Track everything.
Once you’ve got the go-ahead, it’s time to figure out where your company currently stands in terms of paper use, expenses, habits, etc. Track as much as you can:

• How much paper does your company buy?
• How much does the office actually use?
• For what purpose?
• How much gets thrown away?

Also try tracking processes—what are people's habits? Do teachers use paper differently than students? What are the steps they go through when using paper in different situations? Don’t forget to break things down by department, too—if accounting uses less paper every month than marketing, why is that? You might just discover that some of your co-workers can teach others better habits. Yep, it’s a lot of data tracking (spreadsheets are your friend). But it’s the only way to know what changes make sense for your particular organization.

Identify potential areas for change.
This is the fun part, when you get to put your designery brainstorming skills to good use. Can certain steps be consolidated to increase paper usage efficiency? Can you make more sustainable choices the default setting so people need to take fewer steps to make the better choice (e.g. setting printers to print with low ink and double-sided; pre-loading scrap paper into the pinter instead of new paper, etc)? Think big at this stage, putting all ideas—however absurd—on the table. Then once you’ve got a good variety of potential approaches, narrow your plan based on the realities of your office, your available resources, and so on.

Make it easy.
Once it’s time to actually put your paper plan into action, there are all kinds of techniques to get people involved. In Switch, the Heath brothers describe a fundamentally important method for changing people’s habits: make it easy for them to do so. If you want people to recycle used paper instead of throwing it in the trash bin, then make it easier for them to make the better choice by placing recycle bins closer to them than the trash cans. These decisions are often so simple or obvious that they’re frequently overlooked—but they often make the difference between success and failure.

Adapt and thrive.
Organizing and implementing a sustainable paper plan takes commitment, time, and the participation of your co-workers. Don’t blow all that dedication by resting on your laurels once everything’s in place. Schedule a monthly check-in (with yourself, or your boss, or even the whole office) to identify what’s working, and where the sticking points are. Use this information to make your paper plan stronger. You might even find that once people have experienced a successful implementation, they’ll have new ideas and want to take another step forward toward responsible purchasing and design.

Behavior change can sometimes feel like an uphill climb, but you level the field for yourself and your colleagues. Start getting folks on board by appealing to their own interests, set realistic goals based on how your workplace already uses paper, and get people involved early and often. The easier you make it for folks to participate, the easier it will be to build momentum—and sustain it.