From Green Team to Sustainability Machine

Jack Bruner, co-founder of Mammoth Climate, sat down with Anureet Kaur, Sustainability Manager at Softchoice, to learn how she leverages her coworkers’ desire to have an impact at work to accomplish corporate decarbonization goals.

This conversation was a part of our Speaker Series, Getting the Most Out of Your Green Team ERG. Listen to the full conversation here.

JACK: Our goal today will be to pick your brain on insights about how you've mobilized a very effective group in the Sustainable Softchoice team. First, tell us about what Softchoice does and what your role is focused on with the sustainability team.

ANUREET: We are a tech and IT firm who helps our customers to move from on-premises data centers to the cloud. I was brought in as our first appointed sustainability manager two years ago. A lot of the push is coming from the investors, customers, and other stakeholders, it was really about how do we build this strategy as part of the ESG roadmap as well. We disclosed our Scope 1, 2, and 3. We are really proud of the fact that we quantified all our Scope 3 emissions from the supply chain.

So great, that’s a lot of good work, but I'd say it's not just me or my boss doing a lot of this work. I think it is a collective team effort and what gets me so excited and humble is how we've built  what we call the Sustainable Softchoice Group.

We've seen this evolution going from where it was a Green Team to an ERG to now saying this is a functional unit of sustainability and they are going to be supporting us with advancing our sustainability goals and strategy.

JACK: Amazing, so it's not an ERG anymore, it's matured its way out of it. On that theme of where the ERG or the Green Team or the functional business unit is at in its journey, could you maybe give some context as to the size of the group? And generally, how long it's been around, and what's the stated goal? What are the boundaries of its objectives and responsibilities as a team?

ANUREET: So it started in 2021 and initially the group was brought in to do some Lunch and Learns around waste diversion and how we can reduce solid waste in the office. And then we've seen this evolution. This year, I would say we've actually received the highest number of applications, we have about 18 people that joined the organization. 

Yesterday, we led our very first all company climate literacy training, and the content for the training was developed in partnership with the Sustainable Softchoice Group as well. We had about 250 people join in, a good 12 to 13% participation rate.

The overarching goal is building a culture of climate champions to unleash the potential in our people and also to advance our sustainability strategy and our program. This is not Softchoice’s plan, this is actually our plan, and every single person would be involved and does have that opportunity to participate.

When we say everybody needs a seat at the table, that's great, that's the bare minimum. But are your voices heard? Are your voices integrated in the strategy? And that is the energy and the vision and the optimism I went in with when we built this sustainability group.

JACK: Yes, everybody should have a seat at the table, but what's even more exciting is most people want a seat at the table. What I'm most impressed with is how it's matured into its own business unit, this group is now effectively an extension of your two person sustainability core team.

ANUREET: Now it's a team of 20 and growing! And that's super, super powerful. They're taking to-dos off your plate. And for those who are watching who want to get there, what sort of things is an ERG typically really organized and well-suited to do? What are some of those tasks that you find are most effective to be operated and executed by the Green Team? And where's their power? Where do you find their core strength?

As a part of the internal recruiting process, we send them our sustainability strategy in advance in the preparation and we say, listen, we all get that everybody's passionate about being that trailblazer and changemaker in terms of sustainability, but where does your skill set and experience lie?

We picked members that were aligned with our strategy. Everybody wants to be involved in sustainability and that's great, but where can their skill sets help us? When we started to do this, we would give them projects. For example, what we are trying to build as part of the strategy and roadmap, whether that's designing a way to start, developing the content around climate literacy, supporting our customers with our sustainability goals, and coming up with some programs and ideas.

So I think this notion of a small but mighty team is where historically, many organizations have told their sustainability or ESG teams, listen, you're responsible for building that strategy, and for reducing emissions. And that's not how it should be. It should not just be a top-down approach.

I think it should be a people-centric approach, it should permeate all across the organization. And that's how you could really build that culture of climate champions. So the first step when you're building out this sustainability group or your team is to understand what your strategy looks like and where different functional units really support you. And designing a climate literacy training is a good start because if every single organization is setting up ambitious climate targets and goals, we need to make sure that that advocacy is not just coming from the board of directors, investors or customers, it's coming from the entire organization and people are at the heart of it as well.

JACK: Yeah, I love that there's a structured approach to onboarding people to the team effectively. Your ERG is a collection of people with all kinds of skill sets. You have people from marketing and sales. You have people from communications, software engineers might join. And everyone's got different tools in their tool belt.

What sorts of initiatives has Sustainable Softchoice pushed forward and knocked it out of the park? 

ANUREET: There are so many. During September or October every year, we come up with a transportation challenge, which is good for your physical health and your mental health, to get them more engaged about how you can tap into sustainable transportation sources. 

We're raising awareness of social issues, integrating with climate justice, equity. We're inviting some of our customers, some of our channel partners, and we're doing events that really promote employee engagement. This year, they're going to be involved with some of our climate literacy training, and the content is coming from our sustainability subject matter experts as well as procurement, marketing, and sales to understand what elements of the training we should use to connect the dots? What do they need to understand about net zero and about climate targets? 

One of the other initiatives we're also looking at is setting internal waste goals. Many organizations don't own any of their offices or buildings, so when they work with their landlords, they don't have accurate data on waste. A lot of that data is being modeled, which is a big challenge. So what we had decided to do is come up with an ambitious internal waste diversion target. But in order to reach that target, we need to know the baseline and the different streams of waste. We're going to get our people involved in different ways. We call them our sustainability leads, whether they are based in Montreal, Toronto, Chicago or Vancouver. The whole idea is how can they help us support some of these waste aversion goals? 

And then on the customer side, we are coming up with programs to understand Softchoice can support our customers with our sustainability goals. We work with our design studios to understand the differentiation between spin-offs and green-offs. 

On the procurement side, we're doing quite a bit to understand where our emissions lie in the supply chain and how we can work with some of our channel partners, which is supported by our strategic sourcing and procurement team. 

When we think about sustainability, obviously it's a systems thinking and holistic approach. I think there's a role to play for everyone. And the mindset we go with leads with opportunities, not with risk. I think that's so important as we are trying to build this culture of climate champions. Show them the strategy, and recruit based on what their skill sets are. 

One of the interesting things that we are currently doing with another co-chair on my team is building an organization structure. So if we have three pillars across the organization, our sustainable places, sustainable IT, sustainable supply chain, which team member, which board member or group member can support us? So it's a total paradigm mindset shift. 

JACK: That’s the structure of the ERG?

ANUREET: Yeah, we have a whole organization structure. I’ll give you an example from our treasurer last year. We invited a few of our guest speakers to come in and one of the things we noticed is, can we build a sustainable guide where if we are inviting in speakers, or if we are giving out gift cards, we can potentially tap into those products and services, and determine where we could avoid them. 

And that's something that the treasurer built. She went out in the market, looked at what are some of the products that are sustainable, what does that packaging look like, and what does the lifecycle analysis look like. We built this whole criteria into a catalog that we're going to put across our internal website so that people can tap in and use this rather than  traditional e-commerce. website as well. So that was literally built by a treasurer, but we didn't put the treasurer into a bucket and say you're just going to manage budgets. 

JACK: It's very advanced structural thinking, honestly. Any team needs structure and paths of delegation and decision making. Something that you said that really resonates is there seems to be a common theme in what the sustainability groupies focused on, which is fundamentally literacy. A lot of the work is literacy and data building and bottom-up storytelling. 

For those who aren't familiar, Mammoth is a climate-focused employee engagement company. We help individuals participate in understanding their footprint, and then based on those details and their role, we offer them a personalized journey of steps and literacy. 

The reason I bring it up is because I think the best way to organize these literacy programs is through as close to a personalized path as you can develop. The one-size-fits-all works for the overarching content, but for ongoing participation, we’re used to seeing the internet through a very personalized perspective.

ANUREET: 100%. And I think the challenge is this is still a niche industry, but it's going to grow for sure. We've noticed that coming out of COVID, a lot of the graduates that are going in different organizations, they may not do just a sustainability-centric role. 

When I came two years ago, a lot of the people looked at me as a subject matter expert. And I'm like, that's great, but I think building the sustainability group brought me so much humility because there was so much that I wanted to learn from them, whether it's from procurement or sales. I could just be that one person, completely siloed, building up that strategy, not knowing how to engage. 

I think that's what really brings, for a lot of sustainability professionals, the humility that this is a fast-paced industry. This is growing. There's a lot of regulations coming as well, but it brings humility because there's that willingness to grow and learn from different functional units that may not have that subject matter expertise in sustainability, but can actually help us connect to sustainability and really integrate it with the corporate vision.

JACK: I want to conclude on that theme of humility and what tomorrow looks like, how we can constantly improve and be better. Obviously you're doing a lot, right? And the Sustainable Softchoice team is our group of all-stars, clearly. But we're looking for improvement. 

So the last question I have for you is if you had a magic wand and an “unlimited budget,” how would you change the structure, or evolve it, or improve it so that this team is truly set up with the resources they need to create a culture of climate action and help you achieve your top-down goals at Softchoice?

ANUREET: I think we have such a lovely and passionate group of team members, I just wish I could spend more time with them because they're so willing to be involved in different areas, whether it's building a procurement scorecard, or co-facilitating those training sessions.

If anybody in the audience has read Atomic Habits by James Clear, I love this book. He always talks about that one percent change. If we have to solve the climate crisis, it's not going to be solved overnight. But at the same time, if we do that 1% change every single day, how do you involve your people? The next 1% change would be, how do we involve them in the program? That next 1% change might be, how do we involve them into that internal task force? 

That's what we did. So for all the people, folks in the audience listening to us and thinking, wow, this is really inspiring and we want to be there where Softchoice is, we didn't do this all overnight. I've been there for two years, but it was that 1% change we do every single day to move towards that low carbon economy.

This conversation was a part of our Speaker Series, Getting the Most Out of Your Green Team ERG. Listen to the full conversation here.

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