The Great Balancing Act: How to Incorporate Sustainability Into Your Business Strategy with CHOOOSE

Organizations with an eye towards tomorrow are increasingly incorporating sustainability not just into their travel practices, but into their broader business strategy. But any business leader working towards sustainability goals will tell you it’s a balancing act. After all, sustainability and other business priorities such as cost containment don’t always go hand in hand.

How can organizations appropriately prioritize their sustainability initiatives? How can they best understand their sustainability baseline and make the decisions that make the most sense for their organization? And as business travel regains momentum, how can organizations take action to reduce the inevitable carbon footprint of their business travelers?

In this episode of the SAP Concur Conversations podcast, Nina Birger, Vice President of Climate Solutions for CHOOOSE, answers these questions and more as she explores how leaders can balance sustainability goals against other competing demands to build a more sustainable business, and how they can effectively promote sustainable business travel.

You can listen to this episode on Apple | Spotify | Google or your favorite place to find podcasts.

Read the transcript from this episode of the SAP Concur Conversations podcast below:

Jeanne Dion:

Hello and welcome to the SAP Concur Conversations podcast. Each episode we sit down with industry experts, visionaries, and leaders as they share what it takes to build forward thinking spend programs. Our goal is to get you thinking differently about how your organization spends money. I'm your host, Jeanne Dion, and I'm the vice president of the Value Experience Team here at SAP Concur.

My team works with our customers to bring positive business outcomes based on data-driven insights. And today I am joined by Nina Birger of CHOOOSE. And we are going to tackle the not so small topic of corporate social responsibility and sustainability, exploring how leaders can incorporate sustainability into their broader business strategy, balance sustainability goals against often competing demands, and really just promote sustainability travel practices. Nina, I can't wait to dive in, but first I was hoping you could take a minute and introduce yourself to our listeners.

Nina Birger:

Absolutely. Thank you again for having me today. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I'm Nina and I am the VP of Climate Solutions at CHOOOSE. CHOOOSE is a software company, we provide a technology platform that supports our partners in embedding climate action into their customer experiences. I've been with CHOOOSE for about a year now, and my background's really in corporate sustainability.

I've been in the nonprofit side of things. I've been in the for-profit side of things and thrilled to be on team CHOOOSE right now. And one of the very fun parts of my job is getting to be super involved in a partnership we have with SAP and SAP Concur.

Jeanne Dion:

Wow. Well, thank you for coming here today and I'm super excited for this. Today we're going to focus a little bit on sustainability, but it's a broader topic. It's bigger than just carbon footprint.

For me, sustainability is really about social justice. It's about employee improvement and involvement. It's about being good corporate neighbors and stewards. So I was just wondering, because it's such a broad topic, would you mind starting by framing that phrase, ESG, and talk a little bit about where that fits in today's corporate world?

Nina Birger:

Yeah, absolutely. And I'll say at the start, when I think about climate and the environmental movement, for me personally, it's always completely tied into justice. So it's completely tied into environmental justice and climate justice, love trees, but I really love people and that's why I care about climate.

So a little personal stance. And then to bring it more kind of technical and to respond directly to the question, ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. And in the world of corporate sustainability, sustainability departments are often responsible for those three pillars or those three metrics.

I think if you look back, that stems from the fact that early corporate sustainability work was really focused on engaging with investors. And investors would often look at environmental, social, and governance together as opposed to as separate items. So ESG refers to that at large.

When you talk about ESG reporting, companies are often reporting across those different dimensions. Companies structure their departments differently, so sometimes you have an individual responsible for environment and somebody else responsible for governance. Sometimes it's all bundled together, but that's really what it stands for. And then I think you can think about certain sustainability categories, for example, climate, as potentially stemming across multiple of these pillars.

So climate is obviously an environmental issue, and if you're thinking about measuring carbon, which we'll talk about today, that falls there. But there are also very much social impacts related to climate as well. And you can think about it from a governance perspective too, how a large company is thinking about, say, incentivizing their board to care about climate and the company's climate performance.

Jeanne Dion:

So it is a huge topic. I think we're kind of in alignment there with thinking about the justice part of it. It really truly boils down to that. But I do want to jump in a bit to that idea of sustainability around perhaps carbon footprint in travel?

I know at our fusion event, many of our customers were starting to look at eliminating the lowest logical fair option and really pushing for those direct or non-stop flights as part of their effort to reduce carbon footprint because sometimes cost isn't always the most costly part of spend. So I was wondering if you were seeing that with your customers as well?

Nina Birger:

Yeah, we definitely do see that with customers, whether it's consumer travelers or corporate travel management departments or individual corporate travelers are looking to be carbon informed. They want to understand what the emissions associated with the decisions they are making, and then the kind of bookings that they are flying or staying are. So that is definitely important, I think, to both individuals and companies. And it has to be the starting point to taking any different action.

And then I think to that point you were making about the lowest fare versus let's say the most carbon efficient fare, it has bubbled up. We've heard that in bits and pieces. And I think one of the things that is interesting and complicated at the same time about carbon and carbon management is there are going to be areas where there are really clear win-wins from both a cost savings and a carbon savings perspective.

So one example of that is if you are flying first class, that is much more expensive. It's also much more carbon intensive because you're taking up more space within the plane. That's not to say no one should ever fly first class, but that is an example where, "Hey, if you're flying economy, it will be more cost efficient and more carbon efficient." And then there are these other areas like the one you pointed to where it's going to be a trade off, flying direct is going to be a bit more expensive, it's going to be more carbon efficient as well, but you can't really make informed decisions about those trade-offs until you have that information. You have that carbon awareness or carbon knowledge to build decisions based on.

Jeanne Dion:

That makes so much sense to me. And I think about this, I hear this phrase thrown around a lot, carbon neutrality. And I hear it tossed around as it ties back to mostly larger companies. Is this specific to a particular industry to become carbon neutral or larger companies? Or is it kind of across the board? Are there any trends we can determine with corporations becoming more aware and trying to be carbon neutral in their work?

Nina Birger:

Yeah, I would really say it is truly across industries. It's across companies of all different shapes and sizes. Organizations are very much at different places in their journey. So it's not to say all large companies are already well on their way, not at all. Everyone is at a different place and that's okay. It's about figuring out what's the right next step or first step for you. But it really is across industry. It really is across company size.

And then I think where things get interesting is depending on the specifics of your company, and that has to do with what industry you're in, but it also just has to do with all of your operational details. What your pathway to carbon neutrality looks like is going to be really different. And so while it is kind of a goal and a movement we are seeing across the board, there are many, many, many different pathways to carbon neutrality. And that's going to depend a lot based on your industry and your sector and what you're actually doing.

Jeanne Dion:

It's interesting you say that. I hear a lot about carbon neutrality as it ties back to carbon offsets. People are buying carbon offsets to become more neutral. Can you explain to us what carbon offsets are and are they truly an effective tool for a company to use as part of their sustainability strategies?

Nina Birger:

So what a carbon offset is, is essentially it equates to a ton of carton that has been avoided or removed based on a project somewhere outside of your value chain as a company. So there are these certified carbon offsetting projects. They have to go through a whole process to be certified, and then they issue carbon offsets. And the carbon offsets need to be verified to confirm that they have actually removed or reduced the amount of carbon. And these projects have to prove that they would not be able to exist. They would not be able to avoid carbon, they would not be able to remove carbon if it wasn't for the financing from the carbon offsets.

So they prove this amongst other things. They issue these carbon offsets. And then you, as individuals or companies, can purchase them. And your financing of these offsets allows those projects to continue to exist and to continue to have that climate impact.

So at the highest level, that is what they do. And when you're hearing about carbon offsets, for the most part, we're talking about a voluntary carbon market here. There's a little bit of compliance based stuff going on, and we might see more of that in the future, but for the most part right now it's voluntary.

And then to the second part of your question about what role do they have? Do they really make a difference? I personally think they can be an effective tool for supporting projects that are going to have a positive climate impact. I'd even go so far as to say I think they're an important tool, but they're not the be all end all.

In climate there isn't a silver bullet. It's not one solution. It's quite urgent. We really need everything and we need it all at once. And so I think as corporation thinking about offsets, they can be very valuable. They can be part of your broader climate effort. They can do a lot of good, there's a lot of strengths there. But then you also need to think about what role they play in your broader strategy. You don't want an entire climate program or sustainability program that depends only on purchasing offset.

Jeanne Dion:

Right. Well, I think about it this way when you explain it for me, it's that idea of, "Well, I'm going to run to keep myself in shape, but then I'm going to sit there and eat potato chips on my couch while I watch TV." I can't have both. I've got to figure out how to make both of them in balance. I could have them, but I have to balance it better. So I guess that would be kind of where I go with it.

Nina Birger:

Yeah, absolutely. I can't think of a good way to build off that lovely metaphor. I love both running and potato chips. But to build on that a little further, offsets really depend on making efforts to reduce as much as possible first. And then as a company, you should be using them to act against or address the remaining emissions. I was going to try to make a joke about the potato chips, but I lost it.

Jeanne Dion:

That's okay. I think that it makes total sense to me, and I think that's a really great hint on how we use as an organization, those two pieces. It is a hand in hand. It's not one is better than the other or one is more efficient than the other. It is a full-blown program that looks at every piece of the sustainability puzzle.

Nina Birger:

It should be a multifaceted program.

Jeanne Dion:

So speaking of multifaceted, I was harping on airfare because that's one of the things that we do here. But I was thinking about some of the other places where we are really not very sustainable. I think about mileage. We have a lot of customers, people who drive a lot of miles, whether it's their personal cars or we have that idea of company cars and fleet cars. Is there something that we can focus on as corporations to work sustainability into those type of programs?

Nina Birger:

Yeah. Well, let me provide a little bit of framing and then I'll get to that directly. I think for any company, the first step you want to take if you are thinking about managing your carbon and reporting on your carbon is understanding what that carbon footprint looks like in the first place. And so you think about travel and transportation that you do within a corporation.

It doesn't really make sense to think about policies and think about actions that are specific to company cars or specific to flights until you know what the carbon emissions associated with all of that is, and you know which piece is most material. What is contributing most to that category of emissions? Is it actually the cars and the commuting or is it something else? Because that will then inform what it is that the action that you want to take.

When you're talking about ground transportation, there are lots of different ways you can think about it. Public transportation is going to be more cost efficient than everybody driving in their own individual car. Driving an EV is going to be more carbon efficient than driving a kind of traditional vehicle. But it really depends on the specifics there. And I don't think you can take responsible action as a company until you're really aware of what are the big drivers of emissions in your specific context.

Jeanne Dion:

So if I think about something like that in your framing, it's a broader picture of the carbon footprint. So maybe you shouldn't be focusing on just rental cars and airplanes. You should be looking at your entire picture and then kind of narrowing down to the areas that make the most sense to control so that you can be precise in what you're calculating?

Nina Birger:

Exactly. Yes. And then at the same time, I think you can think about, so let's say you're a company and you're a manufacturing company, so the majority of your emissions are actually coming from the manufacturing. However, at the same time, you have employees that do a lot of business travel. It's not to say you shouldn't care about the business travel and the emissions because you're a manufacturing company. It still matters. And to bring this back to travel, I think one of the things that is really interesting about sustainability and climate action in the business travel space is business travel is so personal.

It's one of the most personal things you do as an employee. And so many companies that we speak to really see what they are doing as it relates to embedding sustainability into their business travel programs and policies as a form of employee engagement. And so for some companies, business travel is a huge part of their overall footprint. For others it isn't. And I'm not saying just because it isn't, doesn't mean you shouldn't take action. There might be other good reasons to do that. It's just good to know. It's good to know as a starting point, what might have outsized impact.

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that because I think about when I travel a perfect example, our hotels. I am that person who puts the, "Do Not Disturb" sign on my door, I reuse my towel, I don't have my sheets changed. I don't even have them empty my trash every day. I'm like, "I'm in there for the duration and I take it off when I leave and I'm done." It's my little thing that I do all the time.

So if we think about it, I see more and more when I look at hotels in our booking tools that there's a lot more that hotels are putting out there, talking about their own footprint in the world. Are there methodologies or things that we should be looking at when we look at even hotel stays and how we interact with that lodging type of situation?

Nina Birger:

So there are some established methodologies for estimating the carbon emissions associated with a given hotel stay. CHOOOSE has deployed this across some of our programs and partnerships so that as somebody who's booking a hotel, you can see estimates on the carbon emissions associated with the stay. We use the Greenview Hotel Footprinting tool, which builds on this large carbon measurement data set that I believe comes out of the Cornell Hotel Sustainability Benchmarking index. So that's a bit of a mouthful. Long-winded way of saying there are ways to estimate the carbon emissions associated with the hotel stay.

I will say it's not quite as precise as, for example, you can get with measuring the carbon emissions associated with flights. That has to do with the fact that it's really difficult to manage and collect all of the very location specific data that you would need across all hotels in order to really do that comparing and contrasting.

But again, there are established strong ways to estimate the amount of carbon associated with a hotel stay. And then I do think, you as an individual, when you stay at a hotel, they're often doing a pretty good job trying to communicate to individual travelers what they are doing. Things like, "Put your towels on the ground if you want them washed again. Please know it consumes this amount of water."

So following those signs to the extent that makes sense to you is another way you can think about embedding sustainability as an individual in your day to day.

Jeanne Dion:

So I think about that whenever I look at those things. I often wonder, I hear this term called greenwashing, and I wonder sometimes if they're just kind of "greenwashing" what they're doing. And I was just curious, could you define for us what greenwashing is and tell us a little bit about why we need to be aware of the potential dangers of that?

Nina Birger:

Greenwashing is a practice that is more often than not discussed in a corporate context and refers to a corporation that goes ahead and makes a big deal out of something small that they did as it related to sustainability without taking really kind of meaningful, broader action and without focusing perhaps on what matters the most.

So if you are a company that doesn't really like driving is a teeny, teeny, teeny little part of your organizational carbon footprint and you have a bike program and you talk all day every day about that bike program and that is your trophy of your sustainability program, but you're not making any efforts to do anything else. That's an extreme example of greenwashing. I think oftentimes they're not quite as obvious as that, but that's how I think about it.

Jeanne Dion:

You mentioned something to me earlier in a conversation that we had about a term that I had never heard before and it's greenhushing. Would you mind explaining what that is as well? Because I found it fascinating.

Nina Birger:

Yeah. So greenhushing is this concept that I've started to see kind of floating around in my circles that refers to when companies very intentionally stay quiet and don't talk about their sustainability goals or what they're doing. They never go ahead and make that public because they're so afraid of being labeled as greenwashing or as doing something wrong.

And I personally see that as a risk because if we really want the kind of scale and type of action that we need as quickly as we need it, we're going to get there faster if companies are making public commitments and then staying to them. When you don't make the commitment public, you're not held to it in the same way.

So not to underestimate greenwashing or letting anyone off the hook for it, greenwashing is bad. You shouldn't greenwash as a company. But I also think we have to be careful that we don't all become terrified to talk about what we're doing or what we're trying to do as individuals or organizations.

I know we also joked about this, there's a real risk in letting the perfect be the enemy of the good and just not taking action at all because we're so paralyzed by doing the wrong thing and we don't have time for that in the climate context.

Jeanne Dion:

No, and it's an interesting thing that you mentioned because you also mentioned something a little bit earlier that I want to tie back to. So hopefully this won't be a tortured tieback, but when you think about that idea of being quiet, about not doing something, being afraid to talk about something because you're afraid of doing it wrong, I think about the generations that are coming into the workplace today, and I think about how hard it is for us to not only recruit, but retain employees, and climate justice is one of the top categories for that age group that's coming into the marketplace now.

So to not say something like that actually hurts you in a lot of other areas, not just in your climate awareness. So have you been hearing or seeing that from customers that this is becoming more of an employee benefit and a retention tool?

Nina Birger:

Completely. I can't tell you the number of times I have heard from a company that a key driver, part of their making the business case internally for specific sustainability actions has to do with talent recruitment and employee of retention and employee benefits.

Trying to tie it back to travel, again, travel is a personal thing. Oftentimes when we see companies having policies in place that tie into offsetting the emissions associated with their business travel, that's something they can communicate to these employees who are doing the business travel as a benefit. And so it very much comes up. And to go back to the greenwashing versus greenhushing, you also don't want to greenwash potential talent or employees, they'll call you out on that.

But I think explaining what you are trying to do and why you are trying to do it really authentically and transparently only has benefits in terms of setting yourself up for success and achieving what you want to achieve and then reaping the benefits that may come from things like employees feeling really attached to your organization and proud to work there.

Jeanne Dion:

So speaking of transparency, I've always thought that you cannot manage what you can't measure. I think that's probably something that you also believe in quite strongly. So when I think about that, what are the KPIs, those key performance indicators, that we are looking for as an organization? And do they differ from small to large company? Or is there something that is very specific that any company could start with?

Nina Birger:

So across environmental, social, and governance, right across those different pillars, you'll have a very diverse set of KPIs. If we are talking about climate specifically, the thing that you are measuring is carbon emissions. So the tons CO2 emitted associated with your operations as an organization.

Again, there are lots of other things you can measure. You can measure water, you can and should measure diversity in your leadership teams. Lots of different metrics across environmental, social, and governance. But if we're talking about climate specifically, carbon is going to be the starting point. And we do see companies, large and small, measuring carbon.

It can be a complicated exercise, but there are kind of first steps for everyone. And I personally think it's relevant across any organization of any size in any industry.

Jeanne Dion:

So when I think about these measurements you just mentioned, it can be complicated. Can some of this be automated at all, or is it all truly just manual calculation, which leads companies to want to not do it?

Nina Birger:

Absolutely. One of the things, so if you ask me, What are the first steps you should do in your carbon journey?" One, it's establishing your baseline because you can't manage what you can't measure, and you need to understand what that baseline is. So you know which sets of activities are the ones that are contributing most meaningfully to your carbon footprint. Because those are probably the ones that you're going to want to measure very precisely because that's how you'll make the data actionable. So that's always my first recommendation.

But my second one is automate what you can. There are absolutely tools out there that support the automation that will allow you to, without manual spreadsheets, translate activity data into carbon data. And I think the thing with climate and sustainability is there's a lot that you can't automate. There's a lot of internal stakeholder kind of management and communication that maybe ChatGPT, whatever, will eventually figure out how to do for us. But today you can't automate that.

And so automate what you can so you can spend the time on the things that are stickier and more difficult.

Jeanne Dion:

Okay. Well, I know our time is coming close to an end, so I just want to, every time I talk to somebody, I try to take three takeaways that I and the rest of our audience can focus on. So hopefully you'll agree with me on these, I'm going to list them out and see how you feel about them.

Nina Birger:

Great.

Jeanne Dion:

My first one is something that you said almost off the top. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Just start. Would you say that's a really good place to just start your journey and your thought process and how you're moving forward?

Nina Birger:

Absolutely.

Jeanne Dion:

Okay. Then the second piece that I'm going to take away is don't look at environmental action as something that just costs your company money. There are win-wins that you can find that will be better for sustainability, will also potentially benefit your budget, and will certainly benefit your employees and your corporate neighbors and your neighbors around you to make you a better company, to make you a better corporate citizen.

Nina Birger:

Completely. And I'll just add on that and say, I think particularly if you are very early in your climate journey as an organization, you will be pleasantly surprised to find that there's some low hanging fruits there.

Jeanne Dion:

Okay. Ooh, nice.

Nina Birger:

Yeah.

Jeanne Dion:

And then the final one I think of is measurement is your friend. Have a clear understanding of what matters to your organization so you can support your business and your company with some real impactful KPIs that show exactly what you're doing. And this is an iterative process. So you pick the first few, it might take you a little while to get it up and running because it takes a little bit of some automation, some manual. But once you've done one, you can go back and tackle some of the other ones because you can see what your baseline is. Would that be true?

Nina Birger:

Absolutely. Measurement, definitely your friend, your best friend.

Jeanne Dion:

So is there anything that I might have missed in my curiosity about this topic? I love talking about this topic, so is there anything I might have missed?

Nina Birger:

We could talk for another three hours, but I think you already summarized three very concrete, and hopefully, somewhat actionable takeaways.

Jeanne Dion:

I just want to thank you, Nina, for coming. I have really enjoyed this and I hope you come back again so we can talk a little bit further about the topic.

Nina Birger:

I can't believe you're saying that even after I said I could talk for another three hours.

Jeanne Dion:

I want you to come back and talk for another three hours. I would love that. So thank you again for participating. We really appreciate it. And thank you all for listening to this episode of the SAP Concur Conversations Podcast.

To hear more exclusive insights and interviews from the world of business travel expense and invoice processing, be sure to subscribe and listen wherever you find your podcasts. And please join us again for our next SAP Concur Conversation.

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