The Employee Support Programme, which forms part of the People and Standards Division, provides a wide range of free and confidential support services to public employees designed to assist them in managing their work and life difficulties, which, if left unattended, could adversely affect their work performance and quality of life.

The Public Service recognises that its employees are a valuable resource and it aims to provide the required support with the objective of strengthening their effectiveness and efficiency at their place of work and supporting their wellbeing.

Our mission at ESP is to offer quality support services to public service employees with the aim of ameliorating their individual well-being and productiveness, so to be able to contribute towards organizational effectiveness and a healthier work environment.

Over the past few years, working collaboratively as a team, we came up with several office-based strategies that are innovative in order for us to contribute towards a cleaner environment even while at work.

Our ideas stemmed from our love towards our environment. Realising how many hours we spend together at work, we decided to adopt the 3 ‘R’ system – reduce, reuse, recycle as best as we could.

• We have for the past 2 years been reducing our waste, reusing stationery items, and recycling not only paper, plastic, metal and glass waste but also organic waste.

• One of our initiatives is having small bins on our desks to recycle paper and plastic. The idea of these bins stemmed from having only one recycle bag based in the kitchenette and thus not only promoting disposing of recyclable waste responsibly but also encouraging staff to move around to create a healthy movement routine within our office.

• As part of our daily work routine we have frequent meetings which require the use of distributing minutes to everyone attending. A few months ago, it was agreed by everyone to distribute the minutes and agenda to all attending the meeting before hand to reduce the use of printing as much as possible.

• Reducing the use of paper was also reduced drastically during our training initiatives. Our work involves regular delivery of awareness sessions across the Public Service and now presentations are not provided as a hard copy. Presentations are sent as a soft-copy to whoever is interested.

• We have also drastically reduced the amount of paperwork we keep for client appointments and session notes as we now have an online system for recording or sessions. Keeping daily process notes electronically has helped us to reduce paper waste throughout these past 2 years.

• Another initiative has been to reduce the use of sticky notes, which are used heavily in our office. This initiative is being carried out by stapling together already used paper and thus reusing paper before we recycle it. Furthermore, we have very recently adopted an online system of leaving notes to each other through an app called ‘Trello’. In this way, we continue to decrease the use of paper. Thanks to this app, we are sharing notes and messages with each other in a fast and effective manner and at the same time paperless as all messages are online.

• Despite not being an obligatory action, as of this year we encouraged each other to recycle organic waste. Recycling organic waste makes us feel part of the community even though we use our premises only during working hours.