This blog entry is cross-posted from my personal blog site.
I have many passions, as I would imagine you probably do too. They are, in no particular order: positivity, the San Diego Chargers (not doing too well this year), customer service, beer, photography, tea, being eco-friendly (green), social media, and of course – DotNetNuke.
It seems that since I’ve been at the DotNetNuke Corporation, most of my passions can be found in one place, and in one job. I get to keep my ties with my social media outlets and even get to spread my wings there, we have an occasional get-together, I take plenty of pictures, we have a tea station, I get to work with DotNetNuke all day long, and the company is GREEN!!! Woo hoo!
Green? That’s right! DNN Corp is an eco-friendly company. Yet one more reason to love DotNetNuke! It’s not something that any single person really thought about it. In fact, since I’ve grown accustomed to being in an eco-friendly company, I overlooked quite a bit of how we’re green. The fact that no one really looks at our business practices that way is truly a testament to how genuine the actual practices are. Everyone here just really wants to do the right thing.
It helps that most of the employees at the corporate office are originally from the San Francisco area, so they are already eco-minded. If you didn’t already know, San Francisco was recently awarded for just one of the numerous initiatives that the city has – this one being for their green power programs.
So… Just how is DNN Corp doing their part to be a responsible business? Let’s walk through them all.
Recycling
Probably the easiest and most common area that any company can do their part to be environmentally friendly is through a recycling program. This is apparent in several areas within the office.
First, several work stations have personal recycle bins where someone can accumulate recyclables over a period of time to save trips to larger recycle bins.
Next, there are two different recycling areas in the kitchen.
Video Conferencing & Communication Tools
There was a time when companies that had satellite offices would need to fly in several people for face-to-face meetings quite regularly. Luckily, technology has progressed to a point where teleconferencing tools can make meeting with people over long distances easier than ever. We can meet with our brothers and sisters in our Vancouver office any time of the day now.
Other communication tools that we all use everyday help too, like instant messaging, VOIP, and more.
E-Fax
I work in a sales department. As you can imagine, since sales deals with finances, there always has to be a paper trail. However, our primary method of handling incoming faxes comes through using an e-fax service. People who need to send a fax in can do so however they normally would. But when we receive the fax, it comes to us in an e-mail as a PDF attachment. No more paper for those darned faxes!
Speaking of paper… Our paper is recycled paper too – but that’s easy to do.
Telecommuting
DNN Corp has employees all over the world. We have offices in Canada and the US, employees in the midwest and the east coast, Ireland, Australia, and more. All of our remote employees are able to telecommute on a daily basis and participate in meetings using teleconferencing software. In addition, those who actually work in our offices are able to telecommute and do so often.
This has many positive effects not just on the wallets of those staying home, but the office uses less energy, the cars are not consuming more fuel on the road, there’s less emissions, and more. For example, those who eat at home typically have less waste during a day since they have access to leftovers and other meals, and are generally not consuming individually wrapped snacks.
Foosball Table
When you are looking for something new to use in the office, it’s not always a responsible thing to go out and buy something new. Many times, what you’re looking for can be found in perfect or near perfect condition used. With San Francisco being the birthplace of the popular classified website, Craigslist, it was no wonder that we were able to find a perfectly good foosball table for sale for a decent price. Who knows… Something like this might end up in a landfill if there wasn’t someone looking to buy it.
Tea
I love tea. There’s no way around it. Tea has all kinds of health benefits, and it is delicious. I was able to convince several people in the office to go the route of tea. Eventually, this led to having enough interest to phase out our bagged teas in the kitchen for loose leaf tea.
Loose leaf tea has a better return on investment, because you can re-steep (re-brew) tea at least 3 times depending on the type of tea you’re steeping. Also, there’s no where near the same amount of waste – think tea bags and boxes. Finally, since we’re getting our tea from Teavana, nearly all of our teas are also organic and/or fair trade. Even our sugar is organic. Also, we can feel even better about our purchases, with Teavana also comitting 1% of their revenues to charitable organizations.
We even re-use our bags from our original tea purchase when getting tea refills at Teavana.
Motion Activated Lights
Nearly every room in our office is outfitted with motion-activated light sensors. This allows our lights to not be left on, not only lowering our power bill, but also not using up energy in empty rooms.
Development
One of the primary concerns of our engineering department has always been around the performance of our code. As we review and write new code, we are constantly doing everything we can to make that code run faster and faster. This has the direct benefit of having a software product with a fantastic response time. However, this also has another added side benefit.
While anyone that uses DotNetNuke for their website solution would undoubtedly be increasingly happy as the product remains fast and gets faster, it also uses less energy. The longer code takes to run, the longer it has to be processed by the web servers it runs on. Therefore, the more power that your code requires to be processed by the web server. This is a lesson that formidable technology companies like Google have learned from and made a positive impact not only on their company and clients, but also to the world.
This can also be seen through our extensive use of virtual machines and virtual servers.
Summary
Like I said before, there really isn’t an initiative here at DNN Corp to save the world, or be a “green company.” And I am certain I missed several things. We just all are like-minded and want to what we can as individuals in the company to make the world a better place. For example, we recycle at home. Why not at work too?
These kinds of things just make sense all around and we can feel better about everything we do at the end of the day since we are making differences on so many levels. With the exception of the tea, I walked into everything already in place, so it makes me that much happier walking into work. I work at a responsible company, with co-workers that really do care about the world around us.
If you already use DNN, feel great. If you’re not, this is yet one more reason to love DotNetNuke! :)