As businesses today strive to minimize their environmental impact, optimize resources, and enhance operational efficiency, unified communications (UC) is a powerful tool in the achievement of these goals. This article explores how embracing UC, and especially UC as a Service (UCaaS), can drive organizational sustainability by enhancing productivity, reducing waste, promoting remote work, and fostering environmental responsibility.
Enhanced Productivity and Efficiency
UC/UCaaS brings together various communication tools such as instant messaging, video conferencing, email, voice calls, and document sharing, creating a more efficient communication ecosystem. With quick access to information and real-time collaboration capabilities, employees can communicate faster, make decisions more swiftly, and complete tasks more efficiently regardless of where they are. As a result, businesses can optimize their workflow, reduce operational inefficiencies, and minimize time and energy wastage. For instance, data analytics within UC/UCaaS platforms can reveal peak communication hours and preferred modes of communication, allowing organizations to allocate resources, such as people and energy, more effectively. By optimizing resource usage, businesses can minimize energy consumption and associated costs. All of this contributes to improving long-term sustainability.
Reduced Carbon Footprint
Traditional business practices often involve extensive travel, which contributes significantly to an organization's carbon footprint. UC/UCaaS offer a solution by enabling virtual meetings, remote collaboration, and telecommuting. By leveraging video conferencing and other communication tools, companies can substantially reduce the need for travel, resulting in lower greenhouse gas emissions, reduced fuel consumption, and decreased environmental impact. Research from Spain's Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals found that working from home four days a week reduces the amount of nitrogen dioxide, the main pollutant generated by traffic emissions, that is produced by around 10%. That study also found that lower levels of home working (i.e., fewer days per week at home) seen in organisations that offer a more hybrid approach to remote work still generate a reduction in air pollution of around 8%.
Promoting Remote Work
Work from home (WFH) gained traction in recent years largely because of the lockdowns associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout the pandemic, UC/UCaaS solutions facilitated remote work by ensuring employees could access the same level of communication and collaboration tools from their homes (and elsewhere). Today, there is considerable momentum behind the desire to continue WFH / remote work.
With respect to sustainability goals, the conventional thinking is that, by allowing employees to work from home or satellite offices, organizations can reduce the need for centralized physical spaces, leading to lower energy consumption, reduced office space, and a smaller ecological footprint. But, several studies (cited below) suggest that WFH may not align well with sustainability goals after all.
According to Is Remote Work Actually Better for the Environment?, published in the Harvard Business Review, “many have assumed that WFH will lead to environmental sustainability gains. Indeed, such dramatic changes in mobility, production, and consumption patterns, temporarily reduced global CO2 emissions by 17% in April 2020 compared to peak 2019 levels. But what seemed like a promising trend soon faded away: emissions are now almost back at pre-pandemic levels, even as employees aren’t.”
All is not bleak, however. That HBR article cited research showing that in the first Covid-19 lockdown in the UK, resulting in the first wave of home working, recycling was shown to increase, in line with pre-existing research espousing that employees adopt more sustainable waste practices at home than at the office. Because of this, it has been suggested that remote working, as facilitated by UC, "may have a net positive environmental impact in terms of a company’s waste management behaviors.”
It is also worth mentioning, of course, that the term “remote work” need not exclusively refer to working from home, but can also refer to the way in which employees communicate and collaborate from other locations around the world. The facilitation of remote work through UC/UCaaS can extend to the ability to hold virtual meetings spanning offices in differing states, countries, or even continents, with less need for long haul air travel which, invariably, comes at a recognised cost to the environment. Because of this, even as organizations continue to call their staff back into the office post-Covid, or at least begin to offer a more hybrid approach to work, UC/UCaaS can still facilitate remote work in a way that poses benefits to sustainability in the future.
Cloud-Based Technology
By utilizing data centers to store and manage information, cloud computing significantly reduces the need for on-site servers and IT infrastructure, leading to a smaller physical footprint for businesses. Cloud providers typically optimize their data centers for energy efficiency, thus they can achieve economies of scale while also leveraging, in some cases, renewable energy sources. This may result in lower levels of energy consumption relative to the proliferation and use of on-site and/or local data centers, as well as potentially reduced carbon emissions compared to traditional in-house data centers. Moreover, the scalability of cloud services allows organizations to adjust their computing resources based on demand, eliminating wasteful overprovisioning and ensuring these computing resources are utilized efficiently.
Additionally, UC/UCaaS, collaboration tools and document sharing help reduce paper usage and the need for printing and physical filing, as well as promoting virtual workflows, likely contributing to further reductions in paper waste and environmental impact. Some argue, therefore, that embracing cloud-based technology not only drives cost-effectiveness and productivity but also plays a pivotal role in advancing environmental sustainability and promoting a greener, more responsible future for businesses.
Few, if any, cloud providers run their data centers entirely on renewable energy. But many do plan to incorporate greener sources of energy into their operations. Even so, some argue that (public) cloud vendors are a favorable alternative to local data centers which primarily still operate on fossil fuels. It can be argued, therefore, that cloud-based technology is, at least, a greener and cleaner way for organizations to operate their UC/UCaaS systems.
However, the argument for cloud-based technology as a tool for sustainability is not one-sided; there is the contention that cloud-based technology can actually have a negative environmental impact. One MIT article suggests that “a single [cloud] data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes.” This is because, unlike traditional in-house data centers, cloud data centers are designed to be hyper-redundant: if one system fails, another is ready to take its place at a moment’s notice in order to avoid disruption in user experience. This redundancy is enabled by diesel generators, redundant servers, etc.
Data-Driven Insights
UC/UCaaS platforms often come with built-in analytics capabilities that offer valuable insights into communication patterns, employee productivity, and resource usage. By leveraging this data, organizations can identify areas of improvement, implement sustainable practices, and make informed decisions that positively impact both the environment and the bottom line.
We have also, in recent years, witnessed an increased marrying of UC/UCaaS and the Internet of Things (IoT), leading to an increased prevalence of smart buildings, whereby energy consumption in the form of lighting, heating and so on is allocated only on an as-needed basis according to usage to eliminate wasteful overprovision of these resources. When IoT technology and UC/UCaaS work together, for example, IoT could recognize failings in the energy efficiency of a particular building or workspace and utilize UC/UCaaS to communicate this inefficiency with the relevant decision makers within the organization who may be able to address this.
In Conclusion
UC/UCaaS enables businesses of all sizes to drive efficiency, productivity via the seamless integration of communication tools. Although there are conflicting studies on the impact of cloud computing (a key component of UC/UCaaS) and remote work, both are here to stay -- as is the need for organizations to implement and achieve sustainability goals. UC/UCaaS platforms allow people to collaborate wherever they are and achieve their business objectives. And, the extensive data provided by UC/UCaaS platforms can be leveraged by organizations to optimize their resource usage and therefore make significant strides toward sustainability while positioning themselves as forward-thinking, environmentally responsible entities in the eyes of their customers and stakeholders.
