We are bombarded lately with "green" everything. No longer does green simply describe the mixture of blue and yellow. And the Irish? Sorry, no longer do you have exclusive ownership of this hue. Now it describes everything from recycling to hybrid vehicles to energy-efficient IT organizations.

In fact, an impressive number of companies - 23% - are developing “green policies,” based on Nemertes Unified Communications & Collaboration research. We expect this figure, gathered in Spring 2008, to increase drastically in the coming year. Companies either will adopt green policies voluntarily or the government can start imposing on them. (And we know self-governance is better than imposed governance!)

Not only are green policies (adopted to reduce carbon and other harmful emissions and to save energy) a politically correct decision by corporate executives, they can be the impetus to make branch and remote workers more productive.

We have found correlations between companies that adopt green policies and those using collaborative Web 2.0 applications. The use of wikis, for example, is higher for companies that have green policies: 62.5% vs. 40.4% for non-green companies. Blog use also is higher: 40% vs. 33.3% for non-green companies. And, the use of shared workspaces is higher: 87.5% vs. 58.6% for non-green companies.

The only area in which there is no clear increased usage is for social-networking applications: 25% vs. 26.3% for non-green companies. However, in this case, the numbers are too close to discriminate within the confidence interval, so they are essentially the same. This is reasonable since companies have not strictly defined the benefits of social computing.

The bottom line: Companies that are actively pursuing a green strategy understand a few key points. Letting employees work from home or close to home saves the fuel (and time). That translates into lower employee turnover. But to keep these employees productive, it is important to have structured collaborative applications, such as wikis, blogs, and shared workspaces, so they can effectively communicate with remote colleagues.

Robin Gareiss is executive vice president and senior founding partner of Nemertes Research. Click  here for the newsletter archive.