We've been giving green credentials of our payroll services a lot of thought lately. For the first time one of our customers has asked us to provide details of our carbon footprint. This is quite common on the continent where measuring the carbon footprint of their businesses is seen as an important issue.
Measuring a carbon footprint in the service industry is unusual though.
But measuring is one thing. Doing something about it is another. Reducing carbon emissions makes excellent business sense though.
Apart from labour, our major costs are paper, postage and power, all of which create carbon. We have and continue to work on reducing costs and carbon emissions in these areas.
So what are we doing?
Reduce paper
- Introducing our online portal and a universal adoption of PDF, not paper, for storing data cuts out approximately 60,000 sheets of A4 paper per annum
- Moving from multipart carbonised payslips to laser payslips also cuts out a major source of our carbon emissions
- One for the near future. Epayslips. Here employees would not receive payslips in the traditional sense. They would receive them online cutting out the need fir printing.
Reduce postage
- The paper saving measures also cut down on the amount we need to post. With payroll reports and payslips approved via our ePaysafe payroll portal we no longer need to send reports by post. Seeing payslips before approving them for printing cuts down
Power
- Our main power consumers are our computers. We have now switched all our staff onto energy efficient monitors.
We have a long way to go but some practical and simple steps together with better use of online payroll portals and epayslips, we can deliver a payroll outsourcing service with significantly reduced carbon emissions
