• by Elyse Levine , January 9, 2013

As marketing professionals, we need to think of “green” marketing not only in terms of helping our clients create socially responsible images, but also how we can practice sustainability within our own agency cultures. For this New Year, we can resolve to eliminate waste on the back-end for ourselves and our clients, which will in turn make the experiences we create for consumers that much more delightful and engaging.

A main issue in fostering this sustainable culture is developing ways for agency teams to become more focused, proactive, and collaborative. So the question becomes “how should agency leadership provide employees with the tools to facilitate goals, while giving the management team a way to effectively measure improvement?”

Our agency’s definition of sustainability centers on the elimination of waste in all its forms – time, entity, and place. We’ve found that the best way to accomplish this is through the utilization of a proprietary project management platform that provides us with the resources we need to work better together. However, any sort of digital system that makes collaboration easier for your team can help your agency culture become less wasteful and more sustainable in five important ways: 

1. It makes the company more “green,” through document-sharing capabilities that will allow it to print less and free up space on servers. 
   
   
2. It builds better communication – and avoids instances of miscommunication – by forming small, multidisciplinary, project-focused teams, sharing tasks, and increasing accountability and responsibility.
   
   
3. Time is saved by eliminating unnecessary meetings and long recap notes, and busy team members can catch up online and stay in the loop. 
   
   
4. Business processes become more efficient through streamlining practices, seamless downloading and editing of timelines and task lists, and eliminating the need to “CC” multiple team members on one email. 
   
   
5. Ultimately, it allows a company’s work to achieve new heights of creativity and effectiveness while recognizing previously unmet client needs through better collaboration, communication and relationship-building. 

Providing team members with the tools they need in order to work more efficiently and effectively is not a simple decision. Creating a sustainable agency culture is not just about adding recycling bins to the office; instead, it implies the elimination of waste everywhere – miscommunications, wasted time, lack of knowledge – and takes just the right amount of dedication and understanding of the needs that drive your agency.  So, how will you resolve to eliminate waste in 2013?