ESG in the Workplace: Benefits and Strategies
Monday, 27th June 2022
Your business’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance is not solely the concern of your investors and board members. Nor does it appeal only to customers and clients either. Instead, ESG can be an incredible asset in bringing the best talent to your business too.
Promoting ESG in the workplace can boost employee productivity and wellbeing, attract and retain talent, and help build your reputation as a top employer. That, in turn, will help you reinforce your ESG performance. And crucially, it will help to drive your business growth.
Here, we take a look at how you can build an ESG workplace—from optimising the built environment to supporting your employees. And we’ll explore why it’s a must for any forward-thinking business.
What is ESG?
ESG—or environmental, social, and governance—refers to a range of frameworks businesses use to measure and report the wider impact their operations have on the world around them. It’s a way that asset holders, employees, board members, and the wider public can understand how a company is doing beyond their financial performance.
Different ESG frameworks measure different metrics differently. But in the workplace, ESG may investigate how space is managed, how efficiently energy is used, or how the company treats its employees across the length of its supply chain.
As the name suggests, ESG is broken down into three main areas, each of which has an impact on the workplace:
Environmental. Typically, environmental ESG criteria measure a business’s level of energy efficiency, its impact on climate change, and the way it manages waste. In the workplace, it may also refer to the space’s use of materials, how much carbon the building uses, or how much water is wasted.
Social. The second aspect of ESG reporting studies its impact on people—both in and outside of the workplace. Key elements you may have to measure include whether employees are happy and thriving, whether they are supported to achieve their personal goals, and, fundamentally, whether their human rights are respected.
Governance. Finally, governance refers to the processes that affect how a business is managed. For example, it can monitor the levels of transparency in decision-making, supply chain management, or executive bonuses.
With 85% of investors now saying that they use ESG factors when making investment decisions, ESG has become a crucial way for the world to understand how businesses behave. But it’s not just for investors that this matters.
Why does ESG matter in the workplace?
Within the workplace, ESG monitoring and success is having a serious impact on employee wellbeing and retention. In fact, employees actively want their employers to engage on ESG issues.
Here’s why it matters so much:
41% of employees would be more likely to stay at a job if their employer had a commitment to low emissions, recent Infogrid research has found. For another 40% of workers, this commitment would attract them to a new position too.
In a survey of 1,000 office workers conducted by Morgan Lovell, 62% said that it was important to them that their employer had a commitment to ESG. The same survey found that 95% of office workers think it’s important that their company’s supply chain is traceable, diverse, sustainable, and transparent.
Employers with the highest employee satisfaction rates have higher ESG scores, a study by Mercer suggests. That’s great, because satisfied employees work harder, stay longer, and produce better results.
Similarly, research by MarshMcLennan shows that attractive employment destinations tend to have lower carbon emissions, more diversity, and a greater concern for employee wellbeing.
Millennials are expected to make up 75% of the workforce by 2030. The so-called “values generation” will soon make up the vast majority of the workforce. When their work life is thought to be more determined by their ethics, ESG will likely matter more than ever.
How to get started with workplace ESG strategy
So, how do you improve the ESG performance of your workplace? Here are some strategies you can put in place.
Begin with your built environment
The built environment accounts for over 40% of carbon emissions in the UK. That means that if you’re serious about improving your ESG performance, you need to start by optimising the physical workplace itself.
There are many ways you can improve your building’s ESG:
Start by monitoring your carbon footprint and waste. Optimising your environmental impact begins with measurement. But that doesn’t need to be as labour-intensive as it might sound.
At Infogrid, we can help you get insight into your workplace’s environmental performance simply and automatically. We use the world’s smallest IoT sensors to track business’s water waste, energy use, and the efficiency of your heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems.
And with this information, you can make optimisations that boost your performance.
Invest in durable, low-impact materials. Lowering your environmental footprint can be as simple as making smarter use—and re-use—of furniture, resources, and materials. And if you’re furnishing your workspace anew, use less concrete and more timber or recycled materials.
Encourage more efficient processes. Businesses can waste a lot of materials, time, and money through inefficient cleaning and maintenance and inadequate systems. By monitoring space usage with Infogrid, you can see where resources are being wasted.
Listen to your employees and stakeholders
To improve your social responsibility performance and drive employee engagement in the business, it’s crucial that you put what your staff want first.
Recognise that hybrid may be the future. Businesses that force employees back to the office may not have their staff’s wellbeing at heart. In fact, in Infogrid’s research, employees stated that they’re more productive at home—and many suggest their mental health is better too.
Giving team members the flexibility and autonomy to decide their own work patterns can increase employee wellbeing overall, and reduce your company’s environmental impact.
Ensure safety in the workplace. Infogrid research has shown that UK employees are more concerned about workplace safety than they were before the pandemic. But they’ve been very clear about what would make them feel better.
For example, data on indoor air quality is something that over half of employees want to see. And at Infogrid, we can help you provide them with that data. With our Healthy Building System, you can get visibility on viral transmission risk and air quality, ensuring that your staff are working in a healthy environment.
Engage with the local community through charity initiatives. To excel at ESG, it’s not just your employees that you should care about. Part of your ESG workplace performance is concerned with the positive impact you have on the wider world. Workplace giving, for example, can be a great way to boost your community impact.
Improve your governance and supply chain
Finally, it’s your job to ensure that everyone in your business is doing what they should. This means ensuring that governance best practices are followed, throughout your supply chain.
Create transparent business practices. It goes without saying that bribery, unfair executive bonuses, and a lack of transparency in decision-making won’t make for a positive score in corporate governance. If it’s true that 95% of employees want to work in a transparent and just business environment, you’ll lose their support too.
Work with companies with similar values. Exploitative or environmentally unfriendly businesses in your supply chain will have an impact on your own ESG performance. Creating a workplace that performs well means working with partners that align with your values.
Security and cybersecurity. Data protection remains an important part of your ESG score. When tracking building performance, ensuring data integrity is crucial. With Infogrid, we make sure that the security of your data comes front and centre.
How Infogrid can help
Infogrid can help you take control of your workplace’s sustainability, by giving you concrete insight into your environmental risks and performance, alongside factors affecting employee health.
Our experts can ensure that your data is error free and valid too, to ensure accurate and reliable ESG reporting.
With our Healthy Building System, we can help you monitor your building’s carbon and energy footprint, while helping you identify key ways to improve your score. For instance, we helped one company save 800 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year on their HVAC system alone.
We can help you too. Book a demo to find out how.
