OFFICE BUZZ. No plastic@work

It’s back to ink pens, steel cutlery and cloth bags at many offices in India. Embracing the World Environment Day 2018 theme of Beat Plastic Pollution, a host of workplaces in India on June 5 announced they would strive to eradicate the problematic polymer from their premises. Leading the way was the Kerala government which said it would ban all disposable plastic items from its offices across the State in keeping with the Haritha Keralam mission. No more coffee in disposable cups – employees should bring their own mugs. Global advertising technology firm Media.net too has banned the use of plastic on its premises and started segregating food waste. Consulting firm Feedback India has formed a green task force to promote environment-friendly practices in its workplace. The Park Hotels has banned plastic straws from all its hotels, replacing them with paper straws. Railway minister Piyush Goyal, meanwhile, tweeted that plastic plates were being replaced by biodegradable alternatives in four Shatabdi and Rajdhani trains. A small start but more is needed. To save the planet, perhaps workplaces should start a BYOC – bring your own crockery & cutlery - movement.

A review of five years of investment and revenue data by Boston Consulting Group shows that women entrepreneurs received less funding but generated more revenue. In a report, Why Women Owned Startups are a Better Bet, Katie Abouzahr, Frances Brooks Taplett and Matt Krenz of BCG team up with John Harthorne from MassChallenge, a US-based network of accelerators, to show how women-founded startups differed from those founded by men. They studied the data from MassChallenge, which had funded 1,500 startups since 2010, and put it through the gender grinder to find that there is a clear gap in funding. Investment in companies founded by women averaged $935,000 which was less than half the average of the $2.1 million invested in startups founded by men. And yet, when they looked at the revenue data they found that startups founded by women generated 10 per cent more in cumulative revenue over a five-year period. Are investors listening?

It’s a wake-up call for CIOs. A Gartner survey finds that senior managers are out of touch with the digital technology needs of most workers. Less than 50 per cent of workers – both IT and non IT – believe their CIOs are aware of the tech problems that affect them. Most employees look for solutions on the Internet rather than approach the IT support desk at their workplace. Also, the survey reveals a sense of dissatisfaction with their work devices (only 41 per cent of non-IT workers were completely satisfied with their work devices as compared to 59 per cent IT workers). When it comes to workplace applications, millennials were likely to find tools not approved by their organisations to collaborate with colleagues, preferring them to official apps. Clearly, there is a big tech disconnect.