A common problem for almost all workplaces is the lack of employees’ engagement. We may blame it on the employee, but when the majority of employees suffer from it, workplaces know they are also part of the problem, or perhaps their management techniques.
However, employees are not hard to satisfy, and they can be happy in a workplace even if they are not paid very large sums. In fact, in a study, 90% of employees said that a more fun work environment increases their engagement and 72% of the engaged employees confirmed that their opinion was taken into consideration by their company. One may consider stress as a normal factor in work, but constant stress is bad. And although a manager has more experience that the employees he manages, but it does not mean employees do not have great ideas.
So treat your employees like you would treat your date to make them happy: talk to them about their interests, care for their opinion and point of view, and offer them activities that interest them, not just activities that interest your company. Their engagement will return with plenty of benefits to the company!
It seems strange that being online is causing pollution. We are using a computer, reducing the need for paper, not travelling distances to communicate, and we are using mostly energy efficient machines that have a low average electricity consumption. So why does being online cause pollution? And what can we do to reduce it? In this part, we will be giving you tips on how to reduce your personal carbon footprint impact. In part 2, we will give you tips on how your company can act greener and reduce its Internet pollution impact! I gathered the best advice from various sources, I hope you will enjoy the content!
Internet Pollution
Are you familiar with the term Internet pollution? It is a term that refers to the pollution caused by the data processing servers and data centers, since they consume a lot of energy. In fact, a data center on average consumes the same amount of energy as 30’000 European inhabitants DAILY! Energy is used to power and cool down servers, and ensures that they operate c continuously in case there’s a failure. Since the world still relies heavily on dirty energy, this energy is causing an additional release of CO2!
Retrieved from CCCB Lab, Source: Jon Koomey.
The Internet pollution, also known as Digital Pollution, originates mainly from activities that require a lot of resources, such as streaming videos, mining for bitcoins, and sending/storing emails.
How can I help?
You may think that as a user, you may not make a difference. It is true that the upgrade of data centers and servers is up to the companies. But you can reduce your own activities’ carbon footprint and energy requirements with a few steps:
Take care of your email
Clean your inbox regularly, and get rid of those thousands of emails that you stored a long time ago to read later on, but never did. If you are a nostalgic person and you saved every email your friends and family sent you, just save these letters on your computer and remove them from your inbox, you’ll be doing the Earth a favor.
Unsubscribe from the useless newsletters that you do not read, it will reduce the distraction created by recurrent incoming mail, reduce the number of emails uselessly stored, and help you find the important emails faster.
Send short, clear, and easy to read emails, with optimized attachements. It will require less energy to send and receive the content, and your recipient(s) will need less time to read the email, and understand your goals better. If the email is unclear, you will receive back another email demanding clarifications, which will cause an unnecessary amount of energy to be spent for additional emails.
Use compressed and light format files in your email attachements and when uploading files to an online drive. If you are sharing a photo with family, prefer JPEG format to Bitmap to reduce the size, and you can always resize it. Although a 10 megapixels photo is cool, unless you need professional work done on the photo, you can have a great photo quality for 5 megapixels as well. You can easily resize the photo using Paint or online tools.
Don’t check your email all the time. To avoid missing out on important emails, we advise you to have a personal email for all the personal emails, and a professional email for all education and work emails. You can stop all the incoming email notifications during work hours from your personal email, and you can disconnect from work by turning off the notifications of your professional emails during your off-work time. Not only will you reduce the carbon footprint, you will also be able to work with much less interruptions and have a better performance during work hours, and be able to disconnect better from work and its stress in your off-duty hours.
Unless you REALLY NEED to, don’t use the “reply to all” option when sending back an email. Send the follow-up message only to the concerned people.
Make use of the subject line in emails to inform your recipient about the content, so they know whether it is urgent/important enough to read on the spot, or whether they can read it later.
Act more responsibly online
This part is really important. You need to reduce any unnecessary carbon emissions that your online presence may cause.
Choose a greener online cloud service, use lighter file formats, and reduce the unnecessary use of online space. We know it’s awesome to have a free cloud storage and put all our treasured memories, but it is also consuming too much energy, when you can keep an offline copy on an external storage and/or your computer. Make sure to back-up regularly your files and remove that 4 year old university project that you saved online when you feared you might lose it.
Reduce the number of photos you share on social media by removing unnecessary photos. These photos take a large space off servers, and with the increasing number of users, companies keep on adding data servers to cover the need. Your school photos are really cute, but do you really need an album of 100 photos to confirm it?
Delete your old accounts if you no longer use them, and don’t create unnecessary email addresses just for fun. Although it’s cool to have 1 extra free month from Netflix when using a new account, it’s doing a lot of harm when you consider the number of users doing it.
Bookmark the websites you always visit, instead of researching them every time you want to use them. It will save a whole lot of energy.
Reduce the time you spend online. Since pages usually keep on loading, if you have a long read, you can download the web page as offline copy, or simply disconnect yourself from the internet until you need to use it again.
Optimize your research by using specific keywords and favorite your frequent searches. Remember that each search is using more energy. Prefer using green search engines like Ecosia, as they use way less energy, and prefer clean energy to dirty one. In addition, many of them use the revenue to support an environmental cause!
Research the companies whose services you’re using. You will discover which ones are working towards greener services and which ones do not care about it at all. A good reference is RE100, a reference for companies that pledged to use 100% renewable energy. RE100 is a global corporate leadership initiative bringing together influential businesses committed to 100% renewable electricity. You can also check Clickclean, an initiative by Greenpeace. They do annual reports on the green performance of large corporations, and they do campaigns to influence companies to turn green through petitions.
The next time you think that you can be more eco-friendly when using online services, think twice! Sometimes, their environmental impact is worse than doing things the traditional way. If you can communicate it live, prefer it to sending emails or instant messages. If you feel safe to store a file on local drives, prefer it to cloud systems.
One person may have a small impact, but when a group of people do it, they can make a difference and inspire others to do so as well. So make sure to inform others on how to reduce their online carbon footprint as well!
We do not realize how lucky we are, to have the ability to enter a shop, check items, and buy the item, without overthinking of the cost. So many people have to choose between a loaf of bread and a shirt to put on their back. Although you may think that making free donations can help them, they easily hurt these people’s dignity and may not even be useful for them at all, since many NGOs cannot tailor clothes per group and end up sending the same package to all the people it’s taking care of.
Luckily, a team of Lebanese students in 2016 decided to change things. They created FabricAid, an initiative that gives second hand clothes a new life, and allows underprivileged individuals to enjoy a shopping experience without worrying about the costs.
Omar Itani, a founder at FabricAid and the man behind the idea
The team created a network of donation bins, and made a collaboration with businesses and NGOs to collect clothes. They check the items, select what’s in good condition to be reused, clean it up, iron it, tag it, and put it in their shops. They have pop-up markets called Souk El Khlanj and several permanent markets. Souk el Khlanj means the shop of like-new items. The shops are located in areas where there is a high level of poverty, they are just like any other shop, with well organized merchandise and fitting rooms. The prices range between 0.3$ and 2$, so that people who have low income can shop and pay without having to worry about the bill being out of their purchasing power.
One of Home of Hope Lebanon NGO’s children choosing clothes at a shop that was set up by FabricAid as a collaboration
The items that are not fit for resale are sold in bulk to existing second-hand stores for much lower prices, or they can be used to create new items for RemAid, FabricAid’s own upcycled fashion brand. In 2018, a partnership between RemAid and ESMOD (one of the best fashion design school in Lebanon) was made, and 100 items were created by students and sold in a special event, where prices of unique clothing items made from the used fabric were between 50$ and 150$. The event was made to support FabricAid’s cause. The items were redesigned by ESMOD fashion students and sewed by Sawa for Development and Aid’s women refugee tailors.
2018’s event to exhibit the clothes made by ESMOD’s students for RemAid
This team has also been able to win multiple competitions, and is one of the few to reach over 200 000$ in funds through competitions. Their work has contributed to alleviating two major problems: clothes waste and poverty aid.
Through their amazing initiative, so far, FabricAid has been profitable, created jobs, and made great numbers: – 55,000 Kgs of clothes collected – 37 markets set up – 7,000 beneficiaries – 17 staff members – 32,685 items sold – 19 clothing collection bins distributed
One of the collection bins
The clothes donors are also benefiting, as every once in a while, a new partnership between FabricAid and businesses that support the cause is seeing the light. For example, Jaleesa, a babysitting business, offers discounts to its clients. All these collaborations can be found on their Facebook page, and they’re updated every once in a while.
If you are interested by their initiative, wish to make a contribution, get in contact with the team, or just wish to learn more, you can always check their website and their Facebook account. If you don’t live in Lebanon, make sure to search for similar initiatives or maybe to share the news about FabricAid to encourage others to make similar initiatives in their own communities!
If you feel like a fresh croissant with a hot beverage or a quick bite, and you want a really sweet and kind staff to serve you, then Agonist Coffee Shop is the place you need to visit.
Their employees are mainly people with special needs who were trained to become servers and cashiers in the cafe. They know the menus, prepare the orders, suggest additional items and make your experience full of sweetness. The owner of the cafe Dr Wassim el Hajj is also available most of the time there as to ensure that everything is going as it should.
The food there is really good. I got to eat breakfast there and I can honestly say that their croissant was cheesier and one of the most delicious ones I ever tasted. I would go there again in a heartbeat!
The decoration of the place is simple and cute, they also offer salads and sandwiches, plus some delicious specialties. Around Christmas, they were offering gingerbread houses and cookies for example. They also have small gadgets like inspirational quotes on wood planks that you can hang.
Bear in mind that the service may be a little slower than in conventional coffee shops. The kind staff working in the cafe may do a small mistake or forget a detail from time to time, but the way the team helps the customers, makes the location feel like home. They will make you forget your stress and help you enjoy your time. So just have a little patience and allow yourself to forget time restrictions and enjoy a calm simple meal in a really friendly mood.
Allowing people who face more challenges everyday than others to get a job is one of the noblest things anyone can do, and anyone with any type of handicap should be accepted and given a chance. If there is a lack of laws to give people their rights, you should not lack humanity to offer them a job just because they experience the world and approach life in a way that is different than yours.
For anyone looking for the place, it is actually facing the parkings of Rim company in Jal el Dib, next to La Durée catering, 15-20 meters from the Jal el Dib highway, direction Dora to Jounieh. You can also call them on 76 769 444 or check the map on their Facebook page Agonist Coffee Shop.
This is a beautiful initiative to allow us to see how anyone has the potential just when they are offered the opportunity. Other similar initiatives can be found in Lebanon, like in Sunbola Bakery where workers are mainly with Down Syndrom. Also internationally there are multiple places hiring, like in Farmers’ Market in the USA. If you know any and want to bring attention to it, share with us!
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Hopeful Fatalist 