As a business focused on improving our clients’ operating models, we simultaneously have a team of consultants and specialists working on ways we can enhance our own organisation for our clients and our people.
Here at Clarasys, we regularly ask our team how we can improve, and in our recent annual survey, our people asked us to take a closer look at how we can become more sustainable.
As a result, earlier this year we built a team to search for ways to systematically integrate sustainability into our core business. This team of experts has constructed a sustainability roadmap with some big goals.
We are now working towards becoming B Corp accredited, with the aim of achieving a full score – 200 out of 200. B Corps meet the highest standards of social and environmental performance. Currently, our score is 93, so there’s a way to go, but we are working hard to improve.
To do this, we are looking at every decision we make and how it impacts on our workers, customers, suppliers, community, and the environment.
Here at Clarasys, we are rated highly for our employee experience, we help to improve the communities through our pro bono work, and we have a strong diversity and inclusion policy to ensure people feel welcome when they join us, but we know we have more to do.
Ultimately, we want to help reduce levels of poverty, build stronger communities, and help to create more high-quality jobs, and improve the environment around us.
We are a carbon-neutral organisation. We have calculated our carbon emissions and have used the most credible offsets available to bring us to neutrality. But we want to go further. We will cut our carbon emissions as aggressively as possible to reduce the need for offsets as far as possible, to get to net-zero.
We also aim to become as circular as possible, reducing the resources that we use and the waste we create to the absolute minimum. Right now, we are going through the process of understanding our resource usage so that we can set ourselves a target.
Sam Maguire, who is leading the Clarasys sustainability team, specialises in sustainability strategy and operating model design across multiple industries and has particular expertise in sustainable business models and designing organisations to be more circular.
As we speak to clients who want to follow a similar path to us, we are helping to stretch their view of what’s possible in terms of becoming more sustainable.
Sam said: “We will be really transparent about our progress. We want to demonstrate where we are, where we’re doing well, and where we want to do better. We want to be an example to organisations of how to make these changes.”
Now is the right time to up our ambition on environmental matters because our people want to work for an organisation that takes this seriously. We are also taking these steps because, whilst governments agree on the urgency for realising a low carbon future and creating economic growth for everyone, these issues cannot be solved by governments and non-profit organisations alone. Businesses of all shapes and sizes in every sector also need to step up. We can support you if you are at the beginning of your sustainability journey or if you are in the midst of changing how you work.
Find out more about our sustainability services here. Or, for help building your own sustainability roadmap, get in touch.