Identifying and Summarising the Problem
Corporate business entities generate tremendous amount of waste which adds to environmental degradation and disturbs the natural ecosystem. Office waste management is one of the core and very vital aspects of efficient business management. This is exactly the reason why office recycling is one of the major issues that has been chosen for this report. As a recruitment agency with employee strength of over 200 employees one of the major problems that our business firm is recently facing is reducing our carbon footprint and ensuring a strategic waste management process in the business (Edwards-Schachter et al. 2015). The amount of office waste which is generated each day is over 7 to 8 pounds. The waste generated contains harmful and toxic substances, plastics and other electronic along with non-electronic scrap which is untreated and dumped. Though the problem of waste generation is not new in the organization, yet recently an external sustainability audit reflected very poor performance of the business in terms of sustainability and waste management techniques which are currently in practice (Brunner and Rechberger, 2015). This is exactly the reason why it has become immensely important now to address this current challenge existing in the business operation strategy.
Innovation driven problem-solving approach was chosen to help the business not only reduce waste generation but also to recycle and up-cycle wastes and convert it into reusable products to save operational cost and build efficient. The use of theoretical framework like The Problem Tree approach and Six Thinking Hat approach where used to not only identify the challenges but also derive the cause and effective relationship between the existing challenge and its impact on the business. Though initially there were conflicts of interest yet finally solutions were generated on the basis of group-discussion and brainstorming sessions.
The primary problem-solving approach associated with efficient waste management of the organization and recycling of office waste was to first to understand the severity of the problem, analyse the cause behind the problem and then develop strategic solutions for the same. Initially The Problem Tree technique was used where the management along with the employees focused on understanding what were the non-renewable resources that were heavily present in the system. Plastic was one of the major pollutants, along with some toxic metals (You et al. 2015). Hence the first aim was to reduce the use of these non-renewable and non-recyclable products and replace them with renewable and eco-friendly resources. Then the next aim was to minimise of the amount of waste generation. This could only be possible by cutting down the use of new products and focus on recycling of the waste materials that were fully or partially renewable like paper and polyesters. Hence using The Problem Tree model the cause and effective relationship could be achieved concerning this challenge (Khosravi, et al. 2019)
Next the focus was on using The Six Thinking Hat Approach where the business leaders choose to wear the green hat which symbolises creative thinking approach and encouraged all the employees to brainstorm ideas and participate in the process of reducing office waste and encouraging recycling of office waste (Aithal and Kumar, 2017). The managers advised all the employees to be divided into teams to address the problem of waste generation and each week one team would work towards reducing waste, planning strategies and implementing them and at the end of the month the best team with best result would get an award prize. This was exactly how the process was planned. Every team each week focused on reducing the use of plastic starting from using recyclable tea and coffee cups to decreasing use of plastic bottles in the pantry. Along with this separate compost beans were set up at the office backyards to process and recycle organic wastes. Along with this our organization also partnered with an e-waste recycling company which basically helped in recycling old, unused office electronic which would have otherwise been dumped in the backyards. The organization also focused on going paper less with more digital technology taking over that is using wireless technology and intranet to connect within the organization and using data management system for keeping records or transactions which can be easily accessible. The management then started implementing a centralised recycling program within the organization (Abdallah, Hamdan and Shabib, 2021). This was basically done by setting up the infrastructure where employee could sort their own waste which would make them aware of what could be recycled and what could not. This was more like an awareness building activity which would not have developed if employees would just chuck their waste in dustbins. It was evident that through all this process the organization could not only save its overall operating cost around $9500 every year but could also gradually start selling recycled products like files and folders made from the recycled wastes generated.
Discussion
The primary strength of this solution is that it could help the business attain a sustainable business model along with helping the employees and the management strengthen their internal work culture. Brain-storming of new ideas and working in groups boosted team cohesiveness and altogether helped in minimising long-term operation costs (Das et al. 2019)
However there were also certain challenges which were identified in this process of implementing this recycling process like initially setting up the internal infrastructure like composting bins involved certain capital investment. Moreover bringing changes in regular habits of employees like reducing use of plastics in regular life from kitchen to office desk in itself was somewhat challenging. As any change management process is exposed to certain amount of resistance hence this change process demanded constant support and encouragement from the management
Building an internal work culture which focuses on building green practices, reducing waste of resources and recycling of the waste materials into productive items which can be reused altogether helps in creating an innovative and inclusive work culture. Moreover as the management focused on integrating all the employees at the ground-level that is from strategising to implementation and also focused on complementing and acknowledging employees for their hard work, hence altogether it not only improved workplace practices but also gave boost to team-building (Hastings et al. 2019) and strengthening work place relationship between the board members and the employees.
Personally being an employee of this organization I definitely got the chance to bring some positive change in the organization, add value to the whole process by just changing some of my everyday habits and being more aware of what I am discarding and how I am doing it. This whole process not only helped the business achieve its sustainability goals but individually improved my personal consumption and waste management habits. It has made me more responsible as now a day I always prefer to use metal water bottles, carry my bottle everywhere so that I do not need to purchase any plastic bottle of packaged drinking water. I have been able to reduce the use of paper in daily life and have shifted to taking digital notes on mobile or on my tablet. These small changes in everyday life is exactly what will make the bigger picture change gradually. Moreover in the due course of working in teams and every week trying our level best to come up with new sustainable business ideas and recycling techniques (Kalargiros and Manning, 2015) I have been able to work on my overall communication process. Earlier I have been somewhat hesitant to participate in team activities and also did not openly communicate with any of my managers. However in this recycling program this hesitant has been removed and it has actually helped improve my professional relationship with all my colleagues as well as with the managers
This solution which primarily focused on engaging all the employees in the process of changing the waste management strategies and include all the staffs in the overall decision-making process rather than taking an authoritarian approach towards building these strategies actually helped the management get full support of all the employees, massive participation as well as numerous creative ideas. This would not have been possible otherwise. Moreover the aspect of bringing in some competitive team-building initiative, arranging for compensating the employees (Paulus et al. 2016) in some or the other manner and acknowledging their effort whole heartedly altogether gave this whole purpose a new meaning.
The outcome is definitely expected to be positive and more fruitful for the business in the coming years as the company is now focusing on further strengthening its internal recycling and up-cycling technology and building smart infrastructure along with using IoT and machine learning with the help of certain e-waste management firms so that it can reduce its external cost of managing e-waste and build an inclusive ecosystem of building productive recycled items and furniture that can be sold as a sub-brand of the parent company.
Conclusion:
Thus the overall analysis in this report is specifically meant to understand how innovation driven change management strategies can bring success to the business. The problem of strategic waste management is definitely quite critical and specifically in this competitive business environment. As most brands today across different industry sectors are constantly focusing on strengthening their sustainability framework and practicing eco-friendly and inclusive workplace practices. Hence in such a scenario our chosen organization had to address its waste management issues and implementing office waste recycling techniques which is not only beneficial for the environment but also for its people, the economy and the society at large.
References:
Abdallah, M., Hamdan, S. and Shabib, A., 2021. A multi-objective optimization model for strategic waste management master plans. Journal of Cleaner Production, 284, p.124714.
Aithal, P.S. and Kumar, P.M., 2017. Ideal analysis for decision making in critical situations through six thinking hats method. International Journal of Applied Engineering and Management Letters (IJAEML), 1(2), pp.1-9.
Brunner, P.H. and Rechberger, H., 2015. Waste to energy–key element for sustainable waste management. Waste management, 37, pp.3-12.
Das, S., Lee, S.H., Kumar, P., Kim, K.H., Lee, S.S. and Bhattacharya, S.S., 2019. Solid waste management: Scope and the challenge of sustainability. Journal of cleaner production, 228, pp.658-678.
Edwards-Schachter, M., García-Granero, A., Sánchez-Barrioluengo, M., Quesada-Pineda, H. and Amara, N., 2015. Disentangling competences: Interrelationships on creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. Thinking skills and creativity, 16, pp.27-39.
Hastings, E.M., Jahanbakhsh, F., Karahalios, K., Marinov, D. and Bailey, B.P., 2018. Structure or nurture? the effects of team-building activities and team composition on team outcomes. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 2(CSCW), pp.1-21.
Kalargiros, E.M. and Manning, M.R., 2015. Divergent thinking and brainstorming in perspective: Implications for organization change and innovation. In Research in organizational change and development. Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
Khosravi, K., Shahabi, H., Pham, B.T., Adamowski, J., Shirzadi, A., Pradhan, B., Dou, J., Ly, H.B., Gróf, G., Ho, H.L. and Hong, H., 2019. A comparative assessment of flood susceptibility modeling using multi-criteria decision-making analysis and machine learning methods. Journal of Hydrology, 573, pp.311-323.
Paulus, P.B., Dickson, J., Korde, R., Cohen-Meitar, R. and Carmeli, A., 2016. Getting the most out of brainstorming groups. Open innovation: Academic and practical perspectives on the journey from idea to market, pp.43-69.
You, Z., Si, Y.W., Zhang, D., Zeng, X., Leung, S.C. and Li, T., 2015. A decision-making framework for precision marketing. Expert Systems with Applications, 42(7), pp.3357-3367.
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