Recycling Office Materials: A Guide

All workplaces generate waste, and while manufacturing industries tend to produce the most, it is surprising how much material can be recycled through general office work. If you are looking for effective and efficient ways to manage your office waste, this guide is for you.

What waste is produced through office work?

  • Paper – Paper is often the most abundant recyclable material in any office. While many processes within offices are computer based, office work still generates a lot of paper waste. The good news is that paper is one of the easiest materials to recycle. While it is good to have paper recycling bins in every office, a better way to store paper before it is sent for recycling is to shred and/or compress it. Look at recyclingbalers.com as this is one company where waste machinery can be bought to suit any office space.

Shredding and compressing paper means that more of it can be stored in one place, and because it is shaped into bales, it makes it easier to transport.

  • Plastics / Glass – if your staff eat lunch and other snacks onsite, then there is likely to be plastic waste that can be recycled. Single use plastics such as drink bottles and coffee cups are becoming a big problem for the environment, and most people are happy to recycle if appropriate bins are provided.

Waste machinery can compact and bale a variety of materials, including plastics, and may be something to consider investing in if you have a large, office-based workforce.

  • Electronics – old electronic equipment that is no longer working or in use can be recycled. Often they can be refurbished, or the working components re-used. There are companies that will collect old electrical equipment from your office, and a simple internet search will bring up some results in your area.
  • Food Waste – using bins to collect food waste, such as fruit and vegetable, or sandwich leftovers from staff lunches, is another way that an office can put waste to good use. Food scraps can be collected by a local service, and made into compost.

How to Encourage Recycling in an Office

Having a recycling policy in an office not only helps the environment, but puts the feel-good factor in your team.

One way to help staff recycle is to provide a central point where there are bins that are clearly labeled for different materials. Removing personal trash bins from desk areas will mean that staff have to visit the designated recycling bins to dispose of personal and office waste.

You can also remind staff of the importance of recycling through wall posters, and include a message on staff intranet and email footers. Another fun way to encourage more recycling in the office is to create challenges and give prizes for those who recycle the most, or help others to recycle more.

Recycling is a habit that any office can adopt. With the right equipment, like appropriate bins, shredding and baling machinery, recycling can become an efficient part of a well-run office.

3 Solutions To Streamline Your Legal Business

As the owner of a business in the legal sector, you’re rushed off your feet from the moment you enter your office in the morning to the moment you leave it during the evening. Throw in the fact that you’re at the mercy of the courts and you have to abide by their timeframe, everything about your schedule just gets that much more frantic.

This is why you must resolve to streamline your workflow as best you can. The more productive and efficient you become, the better control you’ll have over your schedule. Ultimately, this will result in you performing more work of an optimized nature.

To find three solutions that will be sure to help you streamline your legal business, be sure to read on.

Embrace technology

There are a host of different pieces of technology out there that you should be embracing in your bid to streamline your business. By failing to embrace them, you will only make running your legal business ten times harder than it needs to be.

One piece of tech that you should definitely be embracing is case management software. This type of software, which is offered expertly by Redbrick Solutions, brings with it a host of features that will be sure to benefit your legal business. These benefits include:

  • Smart search technology
  • Customizable workflows
  • Intuitive to-do lists
  • The ability to import personal letter templates
  • Comprehensive document management
  • Apportionment calculation
  • Easy billing platforms
  • Two-way email integration
  • Shared diary across all of your departments
  • The ability to e-submit SDLT

By making use of such technology, you will be sure to save yourself time and money. What you should do with the time and money that you save is invest it in streamlining your law firm further.

Send out newsletters regularly

Having to constantly inform your clients about the latest services that you offer will distract you from your daily tasks. You can, however, streamline this specific area of your workflow by resolving to send out newsletters regularly. This will help to keep your clients up-to-date with all the happenings within your law firm, meaning you won’t have to interrupt your workflow in order to provide this information on a daily basis.

Automate your booking system

Similarly, having to constantly take phone calls throughout the duration of each working day will also be sure to interrupt your workflow. For this reason, you should seek to automate your booking system.

One way to do this is to invest in an online booking portal. This will see your clients book an appointment with you via an e-calendar that is permanently posted on your website. If you wish to do so, you can then follow up on these bookings by sending out confirmation emails at a time that suits you.

If you wish to take your legal business to the pinnacle of its market, you must resolve to streamline your workflow as best you can. Take the above advice, and you’ll be sure to do just that.

How to Reach Your Target Audience Online

Finding your target audience on online platforms in one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website and increase your online sales. However, reaching and communicating with your target audience can be difficult if you do not take the right steps. This article will guide you through some of the best measures that you should take to find your target audience and encourage them to invest in your business. 

• Establish Your Target Audience

The first thing that you need to do is to find your target audience and to do this, you need to establish a niche. You can find your target audience by establishing what age group, economic background, and locational area you are aiming to attract to your website, as this will then help you to aim your marketing campaigns towards this target audience. 

One of the best ways to find out who your target audience are is to conduct market research, such as surveys and video research, that will help you to communicate directly with your target audience and find out what types of products and services they are likely to be interested in investing into. 

You can also find your target audience by looking at your competitors and the target audiences that they provide products for, and by studying your own knowledge of the products that you are creating.

• Improve Digital Marketing Techniques 

The most important way that you can improve your digital marketing techniques, however, is through your digital marketing methods. Digital marketing is important in order to increase your online exposure and drive traffic to your website, and there are many different ways that you can cater this towards your target audience.

For instance, you need to ensure that your content marketing, such as blogs and videos, create the right kind of content for your audience, and that the social media platforms that you are using are the platforms where your target audience is. If you are struggling to achieve a clear digital marketing strategy, you need to contact digital marketing agencies such as Caffeine Marketing, who can help you to develop your social media marketing, content, SEO and PPC advertising.  

• Establish your Brand Identity 

However, in order to connect with your audience, it is vital that you establish a solid brand identity. For instance, if you are intending to market towards business people, you should ensure that your tone is professional and your website is sleek and formal, whereas students are more likely to appreciate friendly and informal images and colorful websites. 

• Start Networking 

You should also do all that you can to network both in person and online, as this will help you to spread the word about your brand and enable you to gain referrals through communicating with other businesses.

This can also allow you to gain reviews that can encourage your target audience to buy from you, and allow you to find other similar businesses which are looking for a collaboration, enabling you to connect with their customer base as well as your own. Not only this, but networking events usually give you the opportunity to promote and speak about your brand to other businesses who may be interested.

Managing Your Web Team Through Change

Change can impact any business function at pretty much any time however, there are some functions that are more exposed or susceptible to change due to the nature of the work they conduct.

The functions that are most likely to experience change regularly are generally IT, e-commerce and marketing teams. Because technology moves so quickly changes in the market place are common and can have a big impact on websites in the form of security updates and data protection as well as marketing platforms with algorithm changes and new digital marketing channels. 

Managing change within a business usually falls to managers. Common examples of change may include a business take over, a new management team coming in and new processes or technology being implemented into the business.

Resistance to Change 

It’s not uncommon for employees to be resistant to change, even if it’s likely to benefit them in the long run. People who have grown accustomed to existing processes or technology will resist until the last minute by not installing updates or switching to new systems. Some ways to manage change

include: 

• Forming a leadership team
• Creating a feedback loop
• Being clear when communicating changes and emphasizing the benefits to the employee

Creating a Change Management Plan

There are a number of frameworks you can use to create a change management plan as well as software solutions, including the Inpulse change management plan

Regardless of the framework or software, there are some key principles of change management that you need to include in any change management plan. These include;

• Setting objectives
Being clear about the objectives and the outcomes of the plan is important because it will help you to analyze the areas in which you were successful. SMART objectives are often used to create realistic and measurable goals.

Steps to help make the change
Change doesn’t happen all at once, so setting out bite-sized steps that will help you achieve your objectives is a much better way of creating a clear and manageable process so it doesn’t feel too overwhelming. It will also make it easier to get buy-in.

Implementation and timeline
Defining who will be doing what and by when helps to keep all stakeholders accountable and is an important metric to track. Some changes, like moving a website to a new server or upgrading security software, may be critical to achieve by a certain time or may need to be completed at a time that causes least disruption to the business.

Communicating the change
Whether it is just to your team that you need to communicate with or the project is part of a wider organizational change, communication is a vital component. No change management plan will work without it and it’s usually the responsibility of managers to open and maintain clear communication channels which should be defined before the change takes place.

Measurement of the plan’s success
As with any plan, you must have appropriate metrics in place to measure success. Gathering and analyzing data before and after a change will be key in assessing the success or failure of change and the change management plan.