While Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) concerns are not new, the focus on managing your corporate responsibilities will continue to grow.
With ESG markers seen as a measure of sustainability and resilience, their importance has historically been to financial investors, as well as governments setting targets and enforcing regulation. As general understanding of these concerns and their communication has grown, however, so too has the interest of customers and employees wanting to identify and support organisations with values aligned to their own.
These pillars of Environment, Social and Governance will need to be considered within any strategic goals your company is developing. So, we’re going to explore these pillars in three posts which will show how your technology and workspace solutions can deliver real ESG results for your organisation.
Environmental Strategies for ESG Improvements
We’ve broken the environmental banner down into three sections, exploring developments which would enable improvement in each of these areas.
1) Manage the lifecycle of your IT assets and reduce e-waste
Asset management is a significant concern for any established company, the use and reuse of technology will likely extend across the whole organisation while management of these assets is reliant on just a few.
Understanding what you have, where you have it, and the condition of your technology, will allow for better management of these assets in the future.
While there are many possible improvements in this area, the work might start with:
Ensuring clarity of user needs across your organisation - is it possible your people are being given access to technology or solutions they don’t need?
Establishing awareness of system performance across your technology suite - understanding the numbers better will help your team manage your assets.
Considering end-of-life management for assets - is disposal your only option?
2) Reduce paper waste and your impact on deforestation
For a long time, companies working to improve their environmental concerns would talk about paper waste reduction - setting printers to double-sided and ensuring the presence of recycling bins on office floors.
While the conversation has moved on, there is still a place for development in this area.
Multifunctional Device solutions can reduce your reliance on paper - how can you gain clarity on your organisational needs and the extensive cloud opportunities available?
Understanding paper trails and exploring digital options will likely require fundamental process redevelopment.
However, these process improvements are likely to bring benefits to employees and productivity as well as the environment.
3) Conserve energy within your building portfolio
Whatever the extent of your site, managing buildings and infrastructure is key to making real inroads to your environmental goals. With the right building and facilities management systems, opportunities for efficiencies are considerably improved.
Consider opportunities to reduce energy emissions - understanding how your buildings are currently used will be step one.
If data centres are generating the majority of your power usage, reducing this consumption will make a significant impact.
For some organisations, understanding energy consumption across extensive building portfolios is a fundamental sticking point - how will you gain the visibility you need?
Understanding your systems is essential for improvement
While the improvement of your entire technology infrastructure may be unreasonable, hopefully these suggestions will help you see that change is possible for any organisation.
Within the Environmental pillar of your ESG responsibilities, there are a number of areas you can review and, while complete overhaul may be unrealistic, developments in any of these areas will help move your organisation towards significant ESG goals.
About the Author
I'm Terry Chana. I am an innovation strategist that connects customer, employee and brand experiences. My passion lies in building ecosystems to solve business problems by combining creativity and technology.