What Your Organization Can Do Today to Support Sustainability

More and more organizations are incorporating sustainability into their broader business strategy, including their travel practices. And by doing so, they’re reaping real benefits, such as a lower carbon footprint, potential cost savings, and increased employee engagement.

Nina Birger, Vice President of Climate Solutions at CHOOOSE, talked about corporate social responsibility and sustainability with Jeanne Dion, Vice President, Value Experience Team at SAP Concur, on the SAP Concur Conversations podcast. Below are some of the key takeaways from their conversation.

You can listen to this episode on our SAP Concur Conversations channel | Apple | Amazon | Spotify |  Google or your favorite place to find podcasts.

What is ESG—and why does it matter?

Sustainability often falls under the larger umbrella of ESG, which stands for environmental, social, and governance. “Early corporate sustainability work was really focused on engaging with investors,” says Borger. “And investors would often look at environmental, social, and governance together as opposed to as separate items.”

Organizations now use the ESG framework to encompass the work they do to address environmental and social issues, like sustainability, and measure their impact in those areas. “Sustainability is really about social justice,” Dion says. “It’s about employee improvement and involvement. It’s about being good corporate neighbors and stewards.”

Certain sustainability categories, for example, climate, cross multiple pillars. “Climate is obviously an environmental issue,” says Birger. “But there are also very much social impacts related to climate as well.” Birger says organizations may even think about it from a governance perspective. For example, a large company might incentivize its board to care about climate and the company’s climate performance.

“Don’t look at environmental action as something that just costs your company money,” Dion advises. “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.” Taking effective ESG action will make you a better company and a better corporate citizen, she adds.

Start with a baseline so you can measure your sustainability success

Before starting or changing a sustainability program, Birger encourages organizations to take stock of where they are and identify where they may be able to make the biggest impact. “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,” Birger says.

A vital first step is to establish a baseline. “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,” says Birger. She adds that you’ll want to measure those precisely because that’s how you’ll make the data actionable.

After all, as Dion notes, you need to “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.”

Birger agrees and adds, “[There are] lots of different metrics across environmental, social, and governance. But if we’re talking about climate specifically, carbon [emissions are] going to be the starting point.”

In conjunction with this, Birger recommends automating tracking wherever you can. For example, with flights and hotel stays, there are already established methodologies for estimating an organization’s carbon emissions impact.

Sustainability: The key to employee recruitment and engagement

Having a baseline and measuring KPIs enables your organization to make more informed decisions. “There are going to be areas where there are really clear win-wins from both a cost savings and a carbon savings perspective,” Birger says. For example, flying economy rather than first class is both more cost and carbon efficient. Other actions may require a financial tradeoff. For example, flying direct is more carbon efficient than taking connecting flights but may cost more.

Sustainability programs—for instance, when part of an organization’s business travel program and policies—can also have a positive impact on employee recruitment and engagement. “Climate justice is one of the top categories for that age group that’s coming into the marketplace now,” Dion says. Because of this, many organizations are even leveraging this fact to gain internal support for taking sustainability actions.

“One of the things that is really interesting about sustainability and climate action in the business travel space is business travel is so personal,” Birger says. “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.”

The transparency traps of greenwashing and green-hushing

Two traps that organizations can fall into are “greenwashing” or “green-hushing” their sustainability work.

Greenwashing is when an organization makes a big deal out of something small it did related to sustainability—without taking any broader, meaningful action. For example, an organization might publicize it has a bike program but not do anything about the much bigger issue—the environmental impact of its business travel.

By comparison, green-hushing is when companies intentionally stay quiet about their sustainability goals and what they’re doing. Dion explains that in many of these cases, organizations may never make their plans public because “they’re so afraid of being labeled as green-washing or as doing something wrong.”

But as Dion points out, “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” about their sustainability programs.

“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,” Birger says. “[You also reap] the benefits that may come from things like employees feeling really attached to your organization and proud to work there.”

Learn about kickstarting your sustainability journey in this SAP Conversations podcast.