For London Climate Action Week 2022, our Sustainability Lead Sam Maguire, teamed up with Sebastien Thomas, Commercial Director at TripShift and Natalie Izzard, Partnerships Manager at Octopus Electric Vehicles, to provide inspiration on how you can approach reducing Scope 3 emissions from employee travel.
TripShift is a B2B-focused technology platform that makes it easy for companies to track, reduce, and report their Scope 3 emissions, including commuting, business travel, and logistics.
Octopus Electric Vehicles provide low-emission vehicle solutions through an all-in-one solution.
Watch the webinar here or read on for an edited transcript.
Tackling Scope 3: Identify, measure and reduce your travel emissions webinar full transcript
Alex Poppleton: Let’s get started. So I’m Alex Poppleton. I’m the facilitator for this session. And as you can see, we’re gonna be talking about tackling scope 3. Identifying, measuring and reducing our travel emissions. I work as a facilitator in organizational change, and consultant and focusing on culture and all of those kinds of things.
So without further ado, welcome to the session. We have three great speakers today for you.
We have Sam McGuire who’s a Sustainability Lead for Clarasys and Sam’s gonna be talking to us about the behavioural change work that they’re doing to support this kind of work.
We have Sebastian Thomas who’s the Commercial Director for TripShift. And TripShift focuses on bringing data connection solutions to make scope 3 easy, especially on new travel emissions.
And we have Natalie Izzard who’s the Partnership Manager for Octopus Electric Vehicles and they’re focusing on bringing a whole EV solution, for organizations to make scope 3 easy and through salary sacrifice.
And these three have been working together on a project. So I’m sure we’ll hear more about how that’s been working as we go along. If you want to ask a question, by all means, post it into the Q and A function and we’ll collect them. If they’re relevant to the session, as it’s going along to the presentations, as they’re going along, then I’ll interrupt.
And if not, we’ll have some time at the end to have a really good set of questions and answers and a bit of a broader discussion. So fantastic. Without further ado let’s get started over to you Sam.
Who are Clarasys?
Sam Maguire: Brilliant. Thanks, Alex. What I’ll do first is just very quickly introduce Clarasys, who we are and what we do.
So we’re a management consultancy based in London and Boston. We are the experience consultancy. What that means is we take a user-centric design to everything that we do. I, for example, work in the sustainability space. What we’re always looking to do is to create low emission, low waste, great solutions that are fantastic in terms of social impact, but are always designed around users and the behaviours that they require or that we require them to do, to enable to achieve the outcomes that we want to achieve. So what I’m gonna talk to you about today, is how we approach travel behaviour change. I am going talk you through a model that we look at in terms of behavioural science and how we apply that in real-world settings.
So Sophie, if you could just move us on to the next slide, that’d be great.
How to encourage employees to choose travel correctly to reduce scope 3 travel emissions?
So just to introduce the problem that we’re trying to solve, we want employees to choose their travel correctly for the outcomes we’re trying to achieve. So for example, in this context, if we want to reduce our scope 3 travel emissions, we want people who work at our organizations to choose the way they commute or choose the way that they travel for business purposes in the right ways, to achieve those kinds of emissions reductions.
Now, this is Clarasys’ methodology. So we base a lot of our work on two kinds of core concepts. So the first one is the Com-B model of behavioural change. I’m gonna talk you through that and what that looks like in this context. And then the second one is all around, solution design and delivering that through agile methodology. I’m not going to talk too much about that today. I’m going to focus predominantly on the Com-B side of things.
So, what we want to start with in this kind of project is understanding the existing data or using innovative technology, like TripShift, which Seb is gonna talk to you about in a second, to understand your travel footprint.
But the real question that we’re trying to answer is ‘How is travel different across different groups of employees?’, ‘Why are people travelling in certain ways?’, and ‘Where are your biggest areas of impact?’. Now this will require you to have qualitative data from employees explaining why they travel in certain ways.
It may need you to have some quantitative data sets to actually be able to see the evidence of how people are travelling. But what we really want to be able to do from that is to start to pull out design personas. So for example, we’ve got, an executive here who flies for work regularly. They might often hire private vehicles to commute. They might actually just be focused on efficiency. We want to understand what are the behaviours that they have today and why? What is it that they’re looking for? Similar to the urban-based employee or the rural employee, we want to really dig into what are their behaviours and why they do it.
Because then if we have that information, we can start to really design interventions around who they are and kind of what they need.
Once we’ve got those kinds of personas and that understanding of who they are today, we can start to pull out what are the desired behaviours.
So if we’re looking at emissions reduction, what are the things that we need them to do differently in order to achieve that emissions reduction? So for example, for executives, we may want them to only fly if it’s high value. Before it may be that flying was a default but actually, we want them to go, ‘is there a way of doing this virtually’? ‘Is there a way of doing this where we’ll take a train’? We want them to be able to ask themselves those questions. We may want them to move to economy class travel rather than business class, which for some might be really alarming, but actually has a real emissions impact. And it’s not that bad, right? But we want to be able to really clearly identify those sorts of behaviours.
For the urban-based employee, it may be that we want them to move to cycling or walking to the office as a first option and take public transport as a second option. Or for the urban-based employee, may be around ‘look, you drive into the office, can we get you using public transport’, that’s gonna have a huge emissions impact.
And once we’ve got these behaviours defined as the ones that will actually lead to emissions reduction, what we want to start to do is to think about how do we make those happen? And so, as I mentioned before, we use the Com- B model.
So Sophie, if you can move us to the next slide, if that’s okay.
So the Com- B model was produced by UCL in 2011. Basically what it talks to is in order to achieve behavioural change the B in the model, you need to think about capability. So do individuals have what they need to change their behaviour? So do they have the knowledge and skills to actually be able to change their behaviour? Do they have the opportunity? So the external factors or resources required to support the behaviour change and actually, do they want to do it? , is there the motivation that will actually drive them to make that change? So what I wanna talk to is on the next slide is, what this looks like in the context of the individual who wants to cycle to work, or we want to cycle to work.
So in terms of knowledge and skills, are these people who are confident in cycling to work? Have they ever been on a bike in a busy city like London, have they actually ever ridden a bike before? And if not, what are the interventions we need to put in place to give them the confidence to be able to do that?
Is it that you run a cycling proficiency school or join up with someone or an organization to do that. How do we basically build the level of confidence required? Do you do it where actually you set it up where the people can cycle to work together and go on similar routes and pair up? It’s basically about understanding what are the interventions that will actually give people the confidence and the knowledge and skills to be able to do the behavior that we’re trying to achieve.
In terms of opportunity. So we’re asking what resources do we need to put in place for people to be able to cycle to work? Do you have showers in your office where people can get changed? Do you have somewhere safe where they can lock up their bike? Do you need to put in place some upfront cycle to work finance so that people can actually afford to buy a bike or the additional equipment that needs to be in place to make it happen?
So that’s all around going, ‘okay, if we are going to ask people to cycle to work, what will make it a good experience for them so that they are able to do it, as well as having the confidence to be able to actually get to work on a bike?’
And then the last thing is about motivation. So that’s all about, okay, well, what is it that will drive people to actually get on a bike?
Is it going to be for this persona around the emissions reduction piece or actually is the more important thing for them around health benefits or is it that we incentivize people? Actually, they would like some monetary incentivization or, a competition aspect where we are going to provide a challenge board, which shows, how often people are cycling to work.
What we need to understand through that initial set of research and data is what will actually motivate people. Now, this is about upfront design and making sure that if we are wanting to get more people to cycle into work, we are designing the framework and the operating model behind it in the right way.
But what we also need to do is to be able to measure this and actually understand, is it working? Are we actually getting people to cycle to work into the office more? Are people actually doing the behaviour change that we wanted? Now, again that’ll be through employee feedback, but also we need great technology that enables us to understand whether people are changing their behaviours in particular ways.
And this is where my good friend Seb is gonna come in with TripShift and the amazing technology that they’re developing there, which helps you understand, the kind of travel behaviours of your employees in real-time.
Sebastien Thomas: Brilliant, thanks Sam. So let me share my screen so all can see.
Alex Poppleton: As we’re doing this, I just forgot to mention Sophie Jenkins from Octopus is also helping us with the hosting and the tech here. So as we transfer it over. Over to you Seb.
Who are TripShift?
Sebastien Thomas: Right. Well, thanks Alex, thanks, Sam. So, yeah, I’m Sebastien Thomas. I work for TripShift, we are a cloud-based solution. And we are an automated carbon tracking platform.
So, what we do is we can help, automate the process of transport emissions for a company for the famous scope 3, which is quite notoriously difficult to track. And why is it so difficult to track? Well, essentially scope 3 is all the emissions that are directly caused by your business activities but you do not have direct control over it. So the perfect example that we always use is very related to the topic today is employee commute. Your employees coming to work is directly due to your business activities. However, you cannot force your employees to come to work by a certain mode of transport and because you don’t have a direct view or access point on that data, it gets quite tricky to start collecting.
If you know that your company is already collecting its data, maybe have a think about how difficult it is, how painful it is in terms of time resources and if you’re not, or if your company is not tracking the carbon emissions to link to business, travel and employee commute, maybe have a think about how they would come to do that.
How would they start collecting the data? At the moment most people are using two solutions. One is employee surveys which are not very reliable because let’s be honest it’s like when you have to time your, your hours clocking your hours at the end of the week, you manage, it tells you quickly, quickly, and all you want do is go home at the end of the week.
So that data’s not gonna be very reliable because again, most people are going to put in a lot of averages. You might forget certain journeys Etc. The other solution that, especially bigger corporates are using, is going through expense sheets. So you always are, if you go on business travel, going to declare your expense sheets.
So whether it is for flights or train or going to a taxi, for example, to Excel in London. Well, that does give you a good view of some of the data, but it only gives you a partial view. So it is only going to give you what the employee is reclaiming and not the actual end-to-end journey. So while you will know what kind of flight has been used, you won’t know how the employee has gone from either the office to the airport or their home to the airport, and that is going to have to be included. And again, one of the reasons why it is so difficult to track commuting is also because now we have so many different options when it comes to commuting. Before most people would either cycle or use a car or rail service. Right? Now you can jump on a scooter and then, you know, shift to a bus or go on a bicycle. So the way we are moving is also becoming a lot more complicated and a lot more layered, which means that tracking the data is becoming a lot more tricky.
Why should you start tracking scope 3?
Now, why is it all so important in the first place? Why should I start tracking my scope 3? Well, the main reason is as we have all been seeing there’s an increased focus on climate change. There is increased pressure from both stakeholders and consumers that they want to see companies go greener, not just making claims that they are making an effort and you know, they’re doing as much as they can. They want to see hard facts. They want to see hard policies that are actually being implemented. So there are all these pressures coming in from every direction on the private, but also the public sector to really showcase how they are improving and how they’re making an effort to be greener.
Also now quite important, as we’ve seen across Europe already, there is a trend of policies and especially legislation being implemented by governments now in the UK from the 6th of April, we’ve had the PCF D, which is the task force on climate-related financial disclosures, which announced that companies over 500 employees are going to have to disclose their scope 3 emissions.
Now, this is over 500, but because of the way these famous scope 1, scope 2 scope 3’s are organized and how they’re related, even a smaller company’s scope one is going to become a company scope 3. Now, an example of that is a company we are working with and we’re talking to at the moment, which is a smaller company, they’re under 500 employees, but they are a tier-one supplier to a larger enterprise.
And because they are a tier-one supplier, their larger enterprise is asking them to provide that data for them in terms of the emissions of their travel because of their services. So even companies that are under 500 employees are going to have to start tracking.
So now we’ve got all this headache. We have to collect data, a lot of people essentially are throwing a lot of human resources at it. Typically, you’ve got a couple of interns, sacrificial interns that are going to be filling in Excel sheets all day. Eventually, they’ll get Excel burnout or, you know, spreadsheet fatigue. So the main issue we saw as a company was how can we make that data collection more efficient in terms of resources, but also in terms of getting people out of being bogged into data collection and focus more on behavioural change as Sam has just mentioned, and also implementing internal policies, that are going to get you productions.
Now the way we can help with that is, again, going back to that automation, it’s all about automation for us. So that is going to allow you to get a full view of your company’s carbon emissions in terms of commute and business travel. Now, the way it works is we are a cloud-based solution. We have a mobile application that each employee downloads and that mobile application is going to automatically detect each mode of transport that you’re using. So it can recognize each mode of transport in terms of if you’re on a bicycle and shift onto a bus or to a train, the application is automatically going to detect that and calculate the carbon allocated to each mode of transport.
So that means no more surveys, no more Excel sheets, it’s all collected automatically. It is all aggregated to a dashboard that a company administrator is going to have a view of. Now quite importantly everything has to be GDPR compliant. So the first thing that happens to that data is it is automatically anonymized. We’re not interested to see how Sebastian Thomas moves from point A to point B, what we’re looking at is different modes of transport and mobility profiles, and patents. How are people moving, and for how long are they using the bicycle? We’re truly looking at those modes of transport distance and carbon.
Now to make sure we are GDPR compliant we’ve got servers in the UK and we’ve got servers in Europe, to make sure that data is stored according to GDPR compliance. And we are also opening as Sam mentioned, we are working with Clarasys, so we will be opening very shortly a server in America to cover Boston, and we are also planning for some of our other clients to have a server in Asia.
Now, once you’ve got all that data integrated in on your dashboard you can then start identifying where your emissions are coming from. Now you can split that data by teams. You can split it by modes of transport. You can split by time. So again, you can really focus on analyzing the data rather than spending your time collecting it.
Once you’ve identified your different hotspots, you can then start focusing on tackling them. So if I see that most of my team’s emissions are coming from private vehicles, then maybe this is what we’re going to highlight, and that’s where you can focus. And we’ll show you how, if you’d switched to electric vehicles, for example, and Natalie will help you with that, you could reduce your carbon emissions by X, for example.
So we did an internal survey on our company and we saw that if we actually all shifted to electric vehicles, we’d be reducing our carbon footprint linked to transport by about 34%, which is quite substantial.
So all this data is really having a clear view of the data is crucial to understanding what are the right policies, because obviously you are going to have different policies on business travel and commute. So this is another thing we differentiate. We can identify business travel and employee commute because your incentives to encourage behavioural change and reduce emissions are going to be different because those mobility profiles are going to be different.
Now, in order to get all that data, you also want to make sure that your employees are engaged. So the mobile application is actually designed to, first of all, encourage behavioural change. And by that I mean reduction in your carbon emissions when it’s linked to transport. But also we have whole sets of gamification embedded in the application to make sure that, again, you’re not only collecting data for the sake of collecting data and then reducing it, but you are also engaging your workforce and your employees on a bigger conversation as well.
Because what we want to do is really not only help to carbonize transport but help companies start a bigger conversation about what is our company doing when it comes to carbon reduction. Now, quite importantly, we are quite niche in terms of, we focus purely on transport. Now we know that companies need to collect a lot more data.
Whether it’s from energy consumption or other sources of emissions. So it’s quite important to have a tool that is going to easily integrate with other platforms. And again, going back to the automation and making things efficient, again, our main mission is to make things efficient when it comes to your data. And for that purpose, we run on Microsoft Azure, which means that we can pretty much integrate with any other platform that is already existing. So again, companies are going to be using legacy programs, whether it’s an SAP or workspace and we can integrate with those programs making sure that your data’s going to be a centralized database.
So when it does come to reporting you’re not going to be scrambling across multiple data sheets or multiple platforms. Everything can be aggregated in one place. And on the final point, once you’ve got the data, it’s all about, understanding tracking and reporting. So, as I mentioned, quite a few companies are now going to have to report their carbon emissions.
We see that even smaller companies, with under 500 employees are going to have to report quite soon as well. That is something if we look at the trend across Europe is already happening in France and in Germany, for example. Germany already even has a tax. So when it comes to reporting, we use the official figures that are going to be recognized by the government you’re residing in.
So for example, in the UK, we use numbers that are published by DEFRA as they’re the ones that are going to be used when it comes to checking the reports. When those audits are going to come about your carbon emissions, those are the numbers and the figures that are going to be used therefore those are the numbers we use.
If you will have an office space in France, for example, we will automatically change those figures to match numbers that are recognized in France because unfortunately, some governments will have there’s a little bit of discrepancy when it comes to agreeing to what are the right numbers in terms of emissions.
So, we make sure that your numbers are going to be matching with the local authority’s recognized numbers. And then finally, again, the reporting is not just for yourself internally, but for externally as well, if it comes to possible investors, if it’s coming to sharing force and using some image, some publicity purposes, or when it comes to auditing bodies you have that report again, easily available based on a click, going back to that, you know, repeated and repeated automation, making your life easy and making things as efficient as possible.
So once you got all the data, as I mentioned you can then solve reducing, and we highlight how you can reduce in a lot of areas where we can. So, as I mentioned on our personal level, it was shifting to EV for the the biggest impact. So on that note, I’ll pass on to Natalie, and yeah, these are my details, but you’ll see them at the end as well.
And this slide will be shared so I’ll stop sharing my screen now and I’ll pass back.
Who are Octopus Electric Vehicles?
Natalie Izzard: Thank you so much, Seb. It was great to hear a bit more about TripShift, and I think hopefully those who’ve joined us today can see how, you know, we’ve heard a bit about that bigger picture and thinking more widely about what your business needs to do to try and tackle this really important problem.
And then right through, into look granular detail in the data. And then the reason I’m here from Octopus electric vehicles is to try and give you, you know, a tangible idea of a solution that you can actually put in place to find some kind of practical methodologies, , to move forward with that data and all those insights that you might get from services like Clarasys and TripShift as well.
And it’s worth mentioning that we actually were part of the pilot for TripShift’s platform, it’s really great – we’ve continued using it. So we’d recommend checking that out as well if you’re someone that’s interested in looking into that data.
So what do we do? So you know, that big, sexy strapline, we are helping businesses and individuals to try and reach that green target for themselves, reduce their emissions significantly. And we do that through leasing electric vehicles. What we’re gonna do first is zoom in on a few scary statistics, which, you know, it’s climate action week, you’ve probably seen some of these already but I think it’s really worth focusing on why we’re and why we’re thinking about this stuff. So thanks Sophie to the next slide, please.
So you could see here, I’m not gonna read all of these out, but carbon emissions are a big problem, right? And we know that a lot of them are coming from transport. And I think people don’t really think about scope 3 emissions when they’re thinking about their output in terms of their carbon footprint, you know, or they’ll think about all those other things they’re doing around like their food choices and their shopping, and actually, your commutes are a really important thing to consider in that.
Air pollution is a huge problem. I live in London and actually one of my colleagues was talking about how for him, he realized that EVs were the way forward when he was pushing his pushchair with his little baby. And, and he was like, oh God, it’s gross. My baby is at, you know, the height where all the exhaust fumes are coming out, you know, we need to move electric. It cannot be good for us, for our children to be growing up with this kind of input. So, you know, it is a big problem and fossil fuels are responsible for a huge amount of these emissions right? So we’ve been really brave at Octopus electric vehicles, and we’ve said, we’re just gonna focus on electric vehicles.
And I know there are lots of questions about that. So I think what I would be kind of, you don’t have to share any thoughts but reflect now, you know, have you been holding onto some myths about electric vehicles? What words come to mind when you think about them? When I first started in this business, I didn’t know a huge amount about electric vehicles. I thought they were the kind of things, you know, they’re super expensive, if it’s winter, I can’t turn it on, all of that stuff isn’t true anymore. Maybe it was relevant a few years ago, but actually, now there are loads of really accessible ways to get in electric vehicles. You know, they’ve done loads on the range. It isn’t just one of those things where you’ve got a hundred miles and then you’ve gotta try and find a charger anymore. Loads of really exciting developments happening and things like our salary sacrifice products are ways for businesses and employees to access an electric vehicle in a much cheaper way.
And on that point, the next slide piece, Sophie. We know that we’re also in this great resignation and I don’t know if that’s something, if we’ve got any HR colleagues or talent colleagues on the call today, but I know from people I’m speaking to often that, you know, people are going, what earth am I going do with my retention tools at the moment? People are asking more from their benefits than they’ve ever asked for before, you know, salaries are going through the roof for graduate entry jobs, and people are being really picky about their benefits and reward package. Something like a salary sacrifice is a great way to say, not only am I contributing towards, you know, reducing my scope 3 emissions as a business, as part of my green agenda that I’ve worked on with someone like Clarasys, you know, really exciting way to actually then say we’re gonna make a tangible impact to retaining our staff as well. We don’t want people to be leaving. It’s expensive to hire new staff. If you can tie somebody in, you know, to a lease, they’re showing their commitment to the business and they’re gonna be with you, you know, at least for the time of that lease, which is great and a great incentive to be able to support them too.
Next slide piece, Sophie.
So just to recap actually what our scheme is then. So yeah, as I’ve said, it’s electric vehicles, we’re part of Octopus Energy. So you might know us from if you use us for your tariff at home and we are their electric vehicle specialists. And what we do is we have this salary sacrifice scheme, the businesses can get involved with it’s like a cycle to work, which you might be familiar with, but for an electric vehicle. So really, really easy and simple to set up, basically in essence, you’re getting an electric vehicle and all of the costs are deducted from your gross salary so before your tax rather than afterwards. So actually you’re saving loads and loads of money and you could be saving up to 40% on some of the really high-end performance vehicles compared to getting them on a personal lease.
So not only are you making that green commitment by going electric. You’re also getting it at a better rate than your mate that’s gone and got it from the local garage, which is fantastic. We also make it really easy to set up and run these. So, you know, as I say, we don’t wanna be adding extra hassle and burden, you’re gonna have loads to worry about, especially in the sustainability and green space. So we make it really easy to do it. , and you know, ultimately this is all underpinned by the excellent octopus customer service that you’ll know and love if you’re a customer already, and making it really easy for both the drivers and the business to make this commitment too.
Next slide, please. Sophie.
So that package then that I mentioned, that’s coming out of your pretax salary, is your car. At the moment, you’re also getting a home charger. So as we all know, as part of this wider commitment to sustainability, you need to think about your infrastructure, and how you’re going to charge your car. Have you got public charging near you, all of those kinds of things. So we support with that.
Up until December, businesses who launch schemes, and their employees are going to get access to this free charger. And if you haven’t got a driveway, don’t worry. We’ll give you credit on the public charging network, which is the electric juice network. This is a really exciting way to be able to support your transition, to moving electric. We know that’s a big barrier to behaviour change. So we’ve been trying to make it really easy for people. And then we also have an electric vehicle-friendly tariff called Octopus Go where you can charge your car really cheaply overnight, and you’d be given the option to move on to that. So it’s trying to make it really, really simple. So as I said, all of those things that you’re being advised to do, thinking about in terms of making that commitment for your business, we’re trying to make it really easy.
Next slide, Sophie.
And who’s doing it with us already? Social proof is one of those things that’s really the best way to persuade, you know, that financial director or whoever that sustainability lead that you really wanna say ‘let’s look into a scheme, it’s something we really wanna try.’ And just on the slide here are just some of the people that we are working with, using their salary sacrifice scheme to try and help them get their employees, you know, going mobile in electric vehicles. And I’m sure you’ll recognize some of them here as well, which is really great. You know, it’s a way to say, ‘Right we’re up there with all of these people who are also making a big commitment to their sustainability goals as well’. And I know that there’ll be lots of similar businesses working with Clarasys and TripShift to make this happen too.
So last slide from me. As I, as I kind of posted in the chat to a few chat questions, I know we’ve had some, questions submitted in advance, so we will talk about some later, but electric vehicles were a really great, easy-to-launch way to make a big commitment early doors.
Obviously, we’re not saying to people, if you’ve got a brand new petrol or diesel vehicle in the driveway to just abandon it and get a new electric car, we know that that’s not a green way to do it, but if you are somebody that’s thinking about ways to be able to make some, you know, small and easy commitments moving forward, but you’ve been a bit on the fence about going electric, you’ve been thinking, oh, maybe I want a hybrid, all those kind of things, you know, check out our website. There’ll be loads of interesting information on there. We have a whole EV learning hub which should give you loads of Intel there. So I would really recommend doing that. You know, if you want to reach out to me on LinkedIn, I can actually see some people have added me already today during the session, which is fantastic. Always happy for a chat or to connect you with the right people. And basically, my kind of closing message would be, really think about this and really explore options that you can for your business. Even if you’re a really small business, right through to those big, large corporates, there are solutions across the board that, you know, anybody on this call would be able to support and advocate for you. And it’s a good way to be able to say, you know, we are making a big commitment to not only support our staff, to make better decisions with their scope 3 emissions but also as a business as well. So that’s all from me. Thank you.
Q&A
Alex Poppleton: Fantastic. Thank you so much all of you. That was really great and really, really interesting. So, so what about some questions? Who’s got questions? Does it all seem very clear and straightforward, or do you have more questions about how this would work? What challenges do you have for yourselves in your own organizations that you are wrestling with that you can ask Sam, Sebastien and Natalie? So anybody like to pop a question into the Q and A if you’ve got one to ask, but we could kick off with maybe some of the questions that we had already, that people have already posted Natalie.
Q – What are the challenges that people face in terms of how they’re trying to tackle scope 3?
So some of the questions that we had were really about kind of, what are the challenges that you’re finding that people face in terms of how they’re trying to tackle scope 3. So I think some of you have covered some of that, but would anybody like to expand on what challenges you’re hearing from potential customers in terms of trying to get their arms around, how do I deal with this challenge in particularly commuting, the business travel piece that, or the travel that’s not necessarily capturing in your normal business travel.
Sam Maguire: Yeah. I mean, I’m happy to jump in there. I think one of the challenges around redesigning travel is that we’re not working from a fixed position. We’ve been through a huge amount of flux in terms of the way that people are travelling over the last three years with the global pandemic and then the kind of coming back to work, the rise of hybrid working, etcetera.
So that’s a bit of a challenge because, actually, we don’t have a necessarily a fixed view to work from, like we may have done pre-pandemic, but that also means it’s really exciting because you’ve got the opportunity to completely redesign travel for a new world based on both your kind of ambition around carbon emissions, but also around health and wellbeing.
Making sure that you are a brilliant place to work, and actually fit more around the balanced lifestyle that people are looking for. And actually not just looking forward, expecting of you. So I think that’s both a challenge and also a great opportunity.
Alex Poppleton: Does that give people a chance to rethink that then Sam, that sounds like?
Sam Maguire: Yeah, exactly that and it, gives people a slightly more of a blank page to work from.
Alex Poppleton: Yeah. Sorry, I cut you off, Sebastian.
Sebastien Thomas: Yeah, no, just building on, on what Sam just said, from a data perspective, as I mentioned, there are more and more ways people can move around with the rise of micro-mobility, but equally as well, the way we work has completely changed. So a lot of us are working from home and a lot of companies have now completely adopted this concept of flexible working. So I know there’s a lot of, for example, Deloitte has given a hundred per cent flexibility. Everyone can work from home if they want to.
So it also then adds the question ‘How do you make sure you get accurate data’? If people are working from home, but are still going to do business travel. I’d also ensure the privacy, of someone’s home. As I’m sure everyone who’s worked from home, we know that sometimes we combine a lot of personal things with work. So for example, if I’m working from home I’m during my lunch break, I might go to the gym. I might go to the supermarket, or maybe I have to pick up my children or I have to walk the dog. So it’s important also to distinguish the difference. And, the way we do that is we can ensure that only your commute and business travel are going to be tracked. And now the way we do that is, first of all, we only track during working hours or the working hours that you agree on with your employer. So the control is really in the hands of the individual who has the application. And from there, you can set privacy areas. So the application can automatically set a privacy bubble around your residence.
Now, the way it does that is, if the application sees that you’re not moving from midnight to four in the morning, it’s going to assume you’re sleeping in your home, hopefully not under a bridge, and that’s going to automatically set that as privacy. So only once you’ve exited this bubble of about an 80-meter radius is it gonna start sending data back to the dashboard. What you can then do again, is set your privacy areas. So, yeah, and also your office. And that’s also the way we can distinguish between a commute and business travel. So everything that’s between your office and your residents, we’re going to assume that is a commute and everything that is, you know, out there and that does not go to a privacy zone, we’re going to classify that as business travel.
A lot of people actually ask us, but I would still like to see my private data. So, what we do is with all those layers of security and privacy on the application itself, you can see all your data. So, for example, including your weekend travel, what we do is only the information that is related to work will be sent back to the dashboard so that it can be seen by your employer. So that way, you know that your privacy is secure, but also on a company level on an employer perspective, you are only using the data that is actually relevant because, in order to really understand what’s going on to generate that behavioural change and implement those policies, you need to have both quantitative and qualitative data and a full view. So again, we do that end-to-end tracking with full view, but only really focused and, and filtered through that is going to be linked to your commute and business travel.
Alex Poppleton: That’s really clever, so amazing. So actually that in businesses can see, can capture all this data. You as an individual employee are in charge of your own data. So you can make sure that the business only gets the data that is relevant to them.
Sebastien Thomas: That’s correct.
Alex Poppleton: And I also see my own data and that would be really helpful to me in terms of kind of behavioural change as well wouldn’t it? Be able to see, you know, as a family, what are we doing or where am I actually spending my time?
How am I doing my own commute, enabling people to take those changes kind of into their personal life too? So that’s, that’s really, really clever. I don’t how you do that, but that sounds really fantastic.
Sebastien Thomas: We’ve got a big brain on the tech level.
Alex Poppleton: So I think there’s definitely next level of kind of, of technology that’s kicking in here. So what other advances technologically, have you managed to bring that anybody actually that has been relevant to help make this more possible now to help capture particularly the scope 3 level of data. So you’ve talked about some of those Sebastien is there any other key changes? You talked about compatibility with big systems that will enable you to share data easily across organizations.
Sebastien Thomas: Mm-hmm , yeah. So the big game-changer at the moment is again, automation.
So as I mentioned, the data collection process for scope 3, because you don’t have really direct control over it, you are relying on a third party and often they also have systems that are going to be as inefficient as you. So it’s really about bringing that efficiency.
So what we are doing now, we are based on the mobile application and we work with your phone so your phone already is taking a lot of measurements when you’re moving around with its velocity, et cetera. What we do is then combine it with our backend so we can sort out the data, and give you accurate numbers and a full picture. What we are also doing and there’s been an increased demand in is rather than just tracking business employee travel, it’s also tracking shipping goods and again, just sort of end-to-end shipping. So there’s a lot of solutions when it comes to tracking goods, for example, that are, you know, manufactured in China, maybe. They go by the Swiss canal, arrive in a port in Amsterdam and are driven down to Paris in a truck. What we’re doing is, we are working on a tracking device that can do that end-to-end tracking game. So the point again is really connecting the dots for you, without you having to have six spreadsheets, and then having to harmonize all of them. So that again, what we are working on next is that we are already working with companies, when it comes to tracking the business travel and the commute, what we are working on next is again, making sure that you can track your goods. So for example, you’d have a little tracking device you could put on a box or on a crate, on a container, and that will automatically track. And again, detect that mode of transport without you having to have any manual input. I think that’s kind of the next stage – really maximizing that automation.
Alex Poppleton: That sounds amazing
Sam Maguire: On that automation point, Alex, TripShift is fantastic but there are other kinds of things to combine with TripShift in terms of that kind of automated piece. So for example, in your travel software that you’re using to book travel or employee travel. Are you pushing people towards certain behaviours? So are you representing the carbon impact of different views or are you putting incentives in place or profiling, particular options, which are lower carbon? Those sorts of things are really important as well as to get the data and people seeing the impact that they’re having via TripShift, it pushes obviously behaviour change through the app, but also where the point that people are making choices, you need to put that kind of automation side in as well.
Alex Poppleton: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve got a couple of questions in actually. So let me read these out to you. So how do you convince employees to use their own data and phones to provide information to the company. You mentioned gamification, but is that enough to engage employees? That sounds like one for Sebastien.
Sebastien Thomas: Yeah so this is always the first question that comes up and it’s the first question we address. So when we onboard a new client, the first thing we do is have a conversation about employee engagement because the main thing is getting people on board.
So the first thing we do is have a conversation about the data. How is your data being collected? How does it work, obviously, without revealing all the secrets in terms of how the algorithm works, but how is your data being collected? How is it stored? How is it gonna monetize and what happens to it?
And generally, the common sense, because again, most people want to do something about climate change. They’re happy to see that their companies are doing something, especially when it’s something more innovative. And quite frankly, that’s going to make their lives easier because a lot of people, I was at an event last week in Bristol and I asked them, how did you come to this event? Did you have to fit in a travel survey? And they said, oh God, yes, we had to fill in another survey cause we have to do them every week now because our company has to because they were part of a large organization that is going to have to report their emissions. So they don’t really have a choice. So the way we have this conversation we have is also because of the way the application is designed – really around an individual.
TripShift actually started (without going through the whole history) as a B2C solution. So we were a consumer product. So we put a huge amount of emphasis on user experience and engagement, and usually, people love the application when they see it because it’s nice on the eye. There’s again, there’s a lot of gamification, there’s an interactive background that you know is going to vary, depending on your emissions, you can either regenerate your environments or your site will be degraded. You can invite your friends to start comparing, having a little bit of friendly competition, but again, it’s about combining the two. One is, it is something that we are all going to have to do in terms of if we are employed by, you know, at the moment, a bigger organization, but also down the line in general. But it’s also about, you know, we are pushing people to want companies to be greener, but at the same time, some people are saying, well, as long as I’m not involved kind of thing, so everyone has to take part, but again, usually because people are willing to do that and they engage with these kinds of projects once that they’re satisfied that, and we show this again, it’s mentioned the first thing we show is that your data is secured and most importantly it is anonymized. So again, we cannot see the only thing that is linked to a set of data is maybe the name and email, which is going to be your work email, which is again, already owned by your employers, they already know the data. So we’re not picking up your postcode. We’re not trying to find out where your school is or where you go in the evening. Because we don’t track that, we are purely collecting motor transport, distance and carbon. In the dashboard, nothing is viewed on an individual level. Everything is viewed on a team level. So for example, Sam and Natalie, who are using the dashboard cannot see the specific travel pattern of a specific individual. So I can see it on my application, but my employee cannot, they can only see the sales team used a car. It produced X amount over X amount of miles. That’s all they can see. So it’s just, again, having that conversation, making it very clear that your data’s secure and again, once people hear that their data is secure and that it’s about reducing and trying to do better for tackling climate change. Usually, people come on board. We’ve had no complaints so far of people saying they wanted to opt out because they didn’t want to take part.
Alex Poppleton: Sounds great. And anything that you can add Sam in terms of the behavioural change needed for that, how to engage employees?
Sam Maguire: Just by being really, really transparent with them in terms of, guys, this is what we’re putting in place to make sure your data’s protected. We recognize it’s a concern. This is what we’re going to be using it for. This is how you can make sure that we’re sticking to that. But actually, we’ve done the pilot. Natalie’s done the pilot as well. Actually, people aren’t that concerned anyway is what we’ve seen on the whole. And it’s also giving people the opportunity to opt-out as well. So it’s not a mandatory thing. It’s something that you have a choice over, make an active choice around it. And it’s the value in that choice.
Yeah, and that is a good way to create behavioural change, to actually start with people who are ready to adopt it. And then as it, as it gets more established in the business, people feel more able to get on board.
Sebastien Thomas: Sorry, just lastly, again and as Sam says transparent, but also because it’s very important to give people a sense that they are also in control. So that’s why we put a lot of control in the hands of the individual. So for example, if you want to opt-out, you can delete your account, and delete your data, so again, it’s also about making people realize that they’re part of the project and it’s not us or their employer forcing them and hitting them with a stick. It’s about, you know, we want you to be engaged, and you have control also over your private data.
Alex Poppleton: Okay, fantastic. So we’ve got another question in. ‘Hi. Are there any standards emerging for the recording of scope 3 emissions EG, uniquely identifying the source of emissions, EG service, product consumable type, rates of emissions, location information, etc?’
So sounds like a question around standards.
Q – Are there any standards emerging for the recording of scope 3 emissions?
Sam Maguire: I’m happy to take a bit of that. So where we are advising clients on scope 3 emissions, we look to the science-based target initiative to be the glowing standard around how to both set reduction targets around scope 3 but then aligned to the greenhouse gas protocol in terms of how best to best to record them.
With setting kind of targets. There are particular requirements in the S P T I around that. So at the moment, though, this is getting more stringent your targets around scope 3 require you to cover at least 67% of your scope 3 emissions in your target. But the kind of the real detail of those pieces are in the greenhouse gas protocol in terms of how to collect them, and then in S B T I, in terms of the target setting, but that’s obviously voluntarily pieces at the moment.
Alex Poppleton: Okay. Thanks for that, Sam. And, any more questions that people would like to ask?
I wondered if there’s also something that we could see in terms of trends. What are the trends that you are seeing in terms of new customers coming forward? I know we haven’t had, are you seeing people kind of embracing, EV vehicles. In a big way, actually, what’s happening in terms of the picture from where you are standing.
Natalie Izzard: So we’re really seeing quite an employee-led drive here. So, lots of employees who are lobbying their employer to try and find a solution for them, I think maybe historically people have been slightly more averse to leasing or having things on finance, but it seems to be now that no one really owns anything anymore, and people are much more open to exploring alternative ways of things like car ownership. So yeah, lots of drives from an employee level, which is great. Cause I mean, people are really engaged and, you know, we have actually had, a business that went live really recently there’s a case study about it on our website, where it came from the staff and, you know, They went to the FD with a proposal, which was really exciting.
But I think lots of a lot of diverse sources, people who are really passionate themselves, you know, you might have one person who loves their Tesla and they wanna get as many colleagues driving them as possible, people are starting to see them more on the roads now.
We also see if the charging infrastructure locally is better, obviously people are more likely to come forward. So we see lots of interest in, you know, London and the big cities because the public network is great, but we are also starting to see more now the charging grant has changed to reflect more of a local authority focus coming from more rural areas as well.
Alex Poppleton: Fantastic. That sounds really great, actually. And my experience also. I think what you were talking about, about engaging employees and organizations, really struggling to find ways. So how do we engage our employees? How do we tie them in? And I think finding a way to connect to people’s personal values around this too. I want to make a difference, can I persuade my organization to make a difference too, really helps to engage employees in a different way.
So any more questions from the audience, or anything else you’d like to ask? The three experts we’ve got here, and any trends that we are seeing Sam, Sebastien, Natalie, anything you could talk to in terms of the bigger trends.
Q – What are you seeing in terms of the take-up?
Natalie Izzard: In terms of take-up of schemes I can really quickly contribute there, but we tend to see around five to 10% of staff take up a vehicle lease with us in the first year and this could then grow depending on lots of factors, year on year, but some small businesses due to that kind of word of mouth and how quickly that can spread.
We might have 40% of staff explore a lease in that first year. So there is definitely that kind of snowball effect in terms of, for us in taking out leasing within that trends. , and we are also seeing that we’re starting to see much more younger people looking at the vehicles as well. Cause there’s a wider range, which is more affordable.
Sam Maguire: I think in terms of commutes, one of the trends that we’re seeing is that people are being much more mindful about commutes. So in terms of when they may not have kind of trips to the office five days a week, but when they go in, they’re being quite intentional about what they’re doing it for. So they’re looking to almost make it a business trip. So they are going to have really high-value in-person meetings in those days that they’re in the office, and then those other days that they’re at home, maybe more for kind of deep, deep thinking, or calls, which are maybe not the high-value ones, they’re actually approaching those trips into the office really mindfully, which is good because that means that actually, they’re thinking about what they’re going to do and whether it’s worth it. So actually there are opportunities to intervene and say, okay, if you are coming into the office, plan it in a better way.
Alex Poppleton: Yeah. Hopefully, people are more able to plan their trips in as it’s not every day and maybe you don’t need to be in at peak times as well, which also enables you perhaps to choose some different methods of getting into work, and it’s not just about the carbon, but also actually the cost.
So Carolina has just asked, will there be a recording available and yes, we’ll be sending out the recording to everyone on the session and also a copy of the slides. So you’ll be able to kind of review those and get in touch with Clarasys, TripShift and Octopus electric vehicles. If you’d like to.
Any more final questions while we’ve got the last couple of minutes, any last comments that perhaps from each of you – what would be your last word?
Sam Maguire: The piece from me is that this is really exciting because actually, we’ve got a huge amount of the solutions that we need to tackle this problem already. This is all about driving change and making sure that people are adopting those solutions that are readily available, so that, for me, is really exciting cause we don’t need to do the hard part.
We don’t need to do the really complex bit actually. It’s just about making it all happen. , and then just in terms of, if you’re interested in hearing anymore about what Clarasys is doing in this space, please get in touch with me.
Natalie Izzard: Definitely agree with Sam on that and I think what’s really exciting in this space is that people are disruptors they’re, dynamic. So can move quickly, you know, some kind of maybe more legacy systems or consultancies or frameworks or whatever might be really slow. You know, they might not be really like, well to respond to feedback whereas I think we’re really fortunate in this space that people are really ready to respond to change and move forward. So it’s a great time to get involved.
Sebastien Thomas: Just building on it pretty much the same, you know, since we’ve come out of confinement, there’s a real hunger for change and changing systems, and that comes with its challenges.
But as Sam said, it’s also very exciting, because we can then redefine how we operate as a society, how we move around, and again, as Sam said, in terms of transport it comes about 20, 24% of our general carbon footprint, which is quite substantial. But as I mentioned, there’s a lot of solutions out there, you know, or EVs a perfect example of them.
And it’s just a question of really getting people on board and showing them accurate data so they can actually start making decisions. Right. Cause a lot of people want to make a difference or want to change their habits, but sometimes they either don’t have the time or they don’t know where to start because we also all have lives we have to get back to and some people just have other focuses, which is fair enough. So having easy access to data that enables us to start then, okay. Asking okay, what is the best solution for me? What does good look like for me? Because everyone is going to have a mobility profile.
So in some cases, I can switch to EV. In some cases, I can switch, maybe switch to a bicycle. It’s about giving them that problem to solve rather than, oh God, I have to, you know, try and figure this out in getting the data. So yeah we are very happy to be contributing to that space. And if any one audience is having a spreadsheet fatigue when it comes to travel service and, or going through expense sheets do get in touch and we can help you with that. Start moving better.
Alex Poppleton: Sounds great. Thank you so much. Just as we closing lastly, just to thank everyone and Sophie for hosting, Sam, Sebastien and Natalie today. Thanks for your attention.
Learn more about our sustainability consulting or people and change management offerings, or check out TripShift or Octopus Electric Vehicles or reach out to Sam, Sebastien or Natalie through their LinkedIn profiles.
