Best practices for sustainability success

Whether you’re already working to reduce your company’s environmental footprint, or you’re just getting started with defining your sustainability goals, the following best practices drawn from the experiences of our community can help.

1. Measure, manage, share

Establishing an environmental policy will help to identify the impact areas you decide to measure, analyze, and manage. Then it’s time to set goals for reductions and share the information with key stakeholders. Salesforce.com customers can do this by customizing Salesforce or by using one of our partner apps, such as the CloudApps Sustainability Suite, available through the AppExchange.

2. Integrate, communicate, collaborate

By integrating sustainability goals into your company’s vision, mission statement, values, and strategies, everyone from your management team to individual employees will be aligned. At that point, communication and collaboration is key. Our free collaboration tool, Chatter, and Salesforce Ideas are the perfect vehicles for sharing ideas and updates and for getting feedback..

3. Engage and inspire employees

You can also use Chatter and Salesforce Ideas to further engage employees and spread the word about sustainability campaigns such as bike-to-work and flexible work programs. Establishing an internal “green team” to help educate and promote efforts like composting and recycling will inspire staff to get involved and empower them to be part of the solution.

4. Manage your supply chain

Standardizing and establishing guidelines for green procurement and/or product compliance is vital to any sustainability program. Check out our community of partners on the AppExchange to find an app that can help you better manage your supply chain for greater sustainability.

5. Streamline business processes with the cloud

Companies that are running their entire businesses with cloud computing via Salesforce are experiencing huge energy savings. There are also incredible business process advantages to centralizing all your information, including environmental data, in one system. Become a salesforce.com customer, join our community, and reap the benefits today.