The Green Workplace is a surprisingly comprehensive guide to greening your office — covering everything from day-to-day business practices to recruitment methods. The book was written by Leigh Stringer, a vice president at global architectural firm HOK, a company that works to “walk the talk” on green business practices.

If you already understand the importance and the business case for going green, it’s easy to skip the first two chapters of The Green Workplace. If you are reading this book and hope to use it to convince others of the payback possible with a green agenda, those chapters are a good place through which to give others the basics.

Chapter three, however, is where Stringer first discusses how to start greening your organization. And this is where she demonstrates her ability to be thorough without being heavy-handed. In just this one chapter, she covers how to engage employees or co-workers, different methods of measuring and accounting for the environmental impact of an organization, sample green roles and responsibilities throughout an organization, and how to make green stick.

This is an awful lot to cover in a short chapter, but it’s highlighted by a couple of excellent charts that offer examples of how to effectively incorporate sustainable goals in a Balanced Scorecard, and an extensive sampling of green roles and responsibilities throughout the structure of an organization. These are effective because they are an easy-to-mimic starting point for any organization.

Chapter four, which is excerpted here on the Green Business website, focuses on creating a green road map and includes a five-step process for rolling out a green project or strategy. It also includes a table of questions to ask when developing your greening program — questions such as “Are virtual communications available and leveraged?” and “Are policies in place to support alternative work?”

Other chapters include discussions of encouraging green behaviour (including an excellent example of ‘green profiling’ — basically understanding how to handle both enthusiasts and naysayers as you start on your green journey). The book is useful in explaining how to manage resistance at various levels, as well as harnessing enthusiasm.

Throughout The Green Workplace, some of the most powerful tools are the charts. For instance, one chart attempts to tie green strategies to functions within a business. The chart sets out which questions to ask which functional areas of the business (senior leadership, HR, IT, customers, real estate and facilities, etc.). Another outlines how to sell particular green strategies by explaining the benefits to three different constituents — people (individuals), profit (business benefit) and planet (environmental benefit).

But while the majority of the book explains how to change the current method of working within an office to be more environmentally conscious gradually, ultimately Stringer suggests that these gradual changes need eventually to result in a more revolutionary change in the way an organization functions. Stringer refers to this as ”transformative design.”

This is where the book strikes at the heart of Stringer’s experience at HOK — with discussions of innovative office design. It includes discussions of productivity enhancers, productivity inhibitors, and designing office spaces and working arrangements to suit different forms of work. This section includes a useful discussion of what type of workers are best suited to alternative workplace settings, and how prepared culturally an office environment might be to adopt such working strategies.

Stringer has created a book that is easy to dive into regardless of where you are on the sustainability spectrum. Although there are a number of short case studies included in the book, the approach to the topic is broad enough that it invites reinvention for any company. What she describes, primarily, is the platform that needs to be created before a company can really embrace transformative change.

The Green Workplace is published by Palgrave Macmillan. For more information visit www.palgrave.com. To read an excerpt of the book, click here; Excerpted from The Green Workplace, by Leigh Stringer. Copyright © 2009 by the author and reprinted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.

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