New Year's resolutions – Be an agent of change

Cast your mind back to high school physics class. Remember Newton’s first law of motion? Yes, that one about a body at rest tending to stay at rest. As well as explaining why it’s so hard to get off the couch on a rainy Sunday afternoon, it also explains why creating change is hard.
Study after study lays out the bottom-line benefits of going green, from slashing energy bills and gaining market share to attracting top employees and boosting investor confidence. And, of course, there are all those feel-good benefits of contributing to a healthier planet.

The trouble is, going green requires change. It means doing things like rethinking the criteria of your purchasing department, convincing your landlord to turn down the thermostat, and inspiring everyone from the data entry clerks to the C-suite executives to lug a mug instead of getting their morning coffee fix in a Styrofoam cup.
Change takes time and effort: two things in short supply in most organizations. In contrast, sticking with the status quo is easy. Everyone understands the routine. It’s comfortable. It’s predictable.
And even if you’re motivated enough to tackle that inertia, where do you start? Does it make more sense to address your electricity usage, for example, or promote carpooling? And once you’ve chosen a goal, how do you go about achieving it?
That’s where WWF’s Living Planet @ Work program comes in. We can’t promise to magically shrink a company’s environmental footprint. Newton’s first law of motion still applies. What we can do, however, is make the job easier, smoother and faster.
We’ve got the technical tools to help businesses decide where to focus, how to plan a sustainability project and how to develop measurable milestones to keep it on track.
At the same time, we’ll help mobilize everyone on staff to ensure success. Change can’t happen without broad-based buy-in, so we offer all kinds of resources to engage and motivate employees.
Finally, we offer access to a community of colleagues all committed to making their organizations more sustainable.
Yes, achieving sustainability takes time. It takes effort. There will be hurdles to overcome along the way. But the results are worth it — both for your business and for the planet.
And the good news? Once you get started, one eco-initiative naturally leads to another. As the other part of Newton’s law states, a body in motion tends to stay in motion.