Sustainable Businesses enterprise tries to have a minimal negative impact on the global, local or communal environment. Such organizations participate in environmental friendly activities ad make sure that their processes, products, manufacturing and other operations are not causing any negative effect on the environment.

Companies can also promote and maintain sustainability by changing or encouraging a certain type of employee behavior through rewards possibly. This article in the guardian talks more about this method and gives examples of Sony which has launched a new scheme to promote green behaviour. This encourages employees to take steps ranging from eliminating their in-office trashcan to turning on the energy-saving settings on their computer and based on their actions they receive ” Sony bucks”.Eric Johnson, who runs the program for Sony Electronics, stated: “small behavior changes add up to big savings, especially when multiplied across a large organization..(The guardian, Stevens)

Also, another way to do this is by Employee transportation. Google’s employee shuttles are an effective way of promoting sustainability. This reduces the number of roads on the car by a huge number, thus reducing pollution and traffic. Other large tech companies in
the San Francisco area, including Yahoo!, eBay, and Apple, have also started shuttle programs in response to Google’s success.

(Image from google employee Kaushik  http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/10-insights-from-11-months-of-working-at-google/)

Therefore, taking these small business decisions can really help society as a whole and also make businesses more sustainable.

This video talks about promoting sustainability through employee engagement

How Should Organizations Promote Sustainably Employee Engagement?

Cited :

Susan Hunt Stevens: ://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/employee-engagement-sustainability-strategy

http://mobile.mit.edu/connected-urban-development/files/cisco/google_employee.pdf

Thinking of a original creative idea is the first step towards any successful business. this article in the business insider shares with us 40 most interesting entrepreneurs that are under 40 and in this post i will talk about some of the ones i found most original and interesting and motivating. These businesses also use internet and latest information technology to run their business.

Nasty girl, a website owned by a 29 year old started in 2006, is a vintage women’s clothing retailer and was named he fastest growing retailer by Inc. magazine last year. This is run by a girl who has a tremendous fashion sense and made use of it to benefit herself and run a business.

Another very interesting idea is the Birchbox,owned by Katia Beauchamp and Hayley Barnait is said to be the Netflix of beauty. This unique business send customers a small box by mail filled with high end beauty products for a monthly cost of 10$ based on each customers personal beauty profile.

Learnvest.com is a website that helps people, especially women control and manage their financial spending. This is run by Alexa Von Tobel, a 30 year old entrepreneur motivating young women too think about and implement their ideas.

Jonah Peretti, the founder of Buzzfeed also made the list. His unique and innovative way of list based journalism approach attracts almost 85 million monthly visitors.

Customer feedback as i learnt in my Comm 101 Performance management class is a Customer metric to measure how well the business is doing in terms of happiness of customers.

An article in the business insider how customer metrics like satisfaction surveys and other feedback can help companies grow.In the IT systems class we talked about how using information technology like social media, websites and online surveys companies can gather customer feedbacks and take actions and decisions based on this.

The article mentions that customer feedback is very important for businesses to build good customer relationships, thus a positive review from people.This also helps companies understand what customers like and what they don’t so they can take decisions based on that for example if a wedding business asks for customer feedback and get to know that most customers like light coloured decor they would make use of that information and make customers happier in future. This further gives companies a constant opportunity and ideas to improve and therefore progress and beat competition.

Gathering customer feedback can help companies improves in branding, marketing and strategic decisions and with the help of information technology these days this is not very expensive to cater to either, keeping the accounting department happy too.