When Scrappy Initiatives Meet Supportive Executives

Jack Bruner, co-founder of Mammoth Climate, sat down with Zach Potter, Green Team Lead and Senior Account Manager at monday.com, to learn how he rallies his coworkers to live as sustainably as they can and help their company meet climate 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: Can you tell me a little bit more about monday.com as an organization, what your role looks like and what your job on the green team is?

ZACH: monday.com is a work operating system (Work OS) where organizations of any size can create the tools and processes they need to manage every aspect of their work. By combining building blocks, like apps automations and integrations, teams can build or customize the workflows of their dreams. Fully customizable to suit any business vertical, the platform is currently used by over 225,000 customers across more than 200 industries and in over 200 countries and territories.

I am the co-lead for the green team in New York, shout out to my co-captain, Jackson Marvin. And like we said, that's my side desk hustle. My day job at monday.com is an Account Manager, I'm working with the existing clients that we have, helping them realize the return on their investment in adopting monday, helping people work more efficiently, do more together, and achieve their goals as an organization.

JACK: I'm curious to understand more about where monday's Green Team is at in its maturity. How many members is it, both New York and globally, and how long has it been around? And if there is a stated goal and focus for the Green Team, could you try and articulate it as well?

ZACH: We're heavily active on Slack as a green team, right now there's 109 members in that Slack channel. Maturity wise, I would say we're getting there, I wouldn't say we are mature yet.

I don't know that we've ever sat down and stated a goal, but I would say that it's to help both monday as a company and monday's employees as individuals live as sustainably as they can.

We have captains in each of our offices. It's been helpful having that localized setup because we're able to talk to the things that matter in individual offices, which can differ, because we have a very global workforce. So these things look different in New York than they do in Tokyo or Sydney, for instance.

JACK: So you've got leads within each office, but maybe you can talk about how it boils up.

ZACH: We have leads in each office, we don't necessarily have a “reporting structure”, there's nobody above the leads. Everything that we do, we work hand in hand with our sustainability manager in our Tel Aviv headquarters, Omer Levy.

Omer is amazing, she's doing as much and more than you would possibly imagine a one-person show would be able to do. Our goal and our structure is really to help her disseminate that throughout the entire organization, office by office. We use that office by office structure to do different things in different offices, partnering with the people in those various offices or with different ERGs. We did something recently with the book club, which is very active in New York. So each of those offices kind of plays to its own strengths and gets involved in ways that are kind of localized for the office and as the locale as a whole.

JACK: Spread across so many cities with so many hot spots of employees, you very naturally start to see different types of challenges poke their head. Maybe lease an office in one area so you don't have control over waste or energy. I know this is something that you've bumped into, but in New York you told me about a great example of waste, I would love to hear that one again.

ZACH: As a company, we're not building our own spaces and we don't always have control over everything that goes on within that space because we’re leasing it. For instance, in New York, our second largest office, we have roughly 300 employees and we're lucky enough to have meals brought in most days for us, for the folks that are working from the office.

Between that and just the general snacking and eating that's going on in the office, we realized that we're really missing an opportunity to deal with that organic waste. When it was going in the trash bags, it wasn't getting sorted by the waste collector, that's not part of the contract that we have with them.

So myself and Jackson started being the compost collectors for the office. When we started out, it was very bootstrapped. I worked with facilities to buy some of those garbage cans that they promise are like stink free, they open with a wave. Then we were taking big bags of compost and walking down the streets in New York City with them. Luckily, our office is one block from Union Square where they have compost collection during the farmer's market on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays.

So we would take that compost, traipse down the street with it, bring it up to the people who were at the Grow NYC compost collection space. They would pick it up–they weren't technically supposed to take office waste from us, but their job is to gather as much compost as they could, so they also weren't turning us away.

Because monday is very data-driven as a company, we started tracking the weight of the compost that we were bringing out. It started with me and Jackson just hefting the bags and trying to guess the weight. So it was wildly unscientific, but at least we were getting the waste to some place that it'd be composted. We then bought a scale so we'd weigh ourselves without the bags, pick up the bags, weigh everything, and do the math to try to figure out how much we were bringing out.

After not that long of doing that, Omer and the sustainability team took this on, and made it a company-wide thing. So we now have a contract with an actual compost collector. We have bins on every floor, they're much better than the ones that we had bought, although I do see people still waving at them, even though the new bins don't open when you wave at them. So monday people, if you're listening, you have to click it. And now, we have signs up all over the office talking about our goal of having 90% compliance during our next waste audit. We're at about 50%, so we have some room to grow, but we’re making strides.

So, that was the journey from us just carrying compost down the streets and now having a corporate collector who comes and picks it up for us every day.

JACK: It's a really powerful example of what a green team is typically really effective in being able to do. The sustainability core practice would love to see waste dealt with in a more productive way in offices. There's hurdles in the way, there's contracts in the way, there's got a to-do list that's massive, that's far too much for any one person to manage.

Zooming out, no two Green Teams are the same. People join because they want to participate, and you end up collecting people who come from all parts of the company: operations, marketing, sales, software engineering. Thinking about the green champions at monday, what do you see as your team's strength?

ZACH: The biggest tailwind for us as a team is that it's just a passionate group of folks. I know I speak for myself and the others that I work with most closely, particularly the US leads, that we just love monday and we love planet earth as corny as it sounds. We kind of want to see monday be the best corporate global citizen that it can, as well as ourselves being the best global citizens that we can.

But we're also really, really blessed, I want to take a minute to shout out monday.com for this. We as an organization are very focused on doing good, it's one of our core principles. It's not hard for us to get the support that we need, or get others to get involved within the employee base. It's a very well-minded group of folks who want to do well for the planet and the people of it.

So, for instance, we have programs for nonprofits that can use monday very, very inexpensively in order to digitize their own processes, which we call Digital Lift. We've also got our emergency response team. Anytime there's a natural or human-made disaster, we're sending a team in to help the people who are managing that digitize their efforts.

So when we have things like that going on, it's not that hard for us to say, hey, we're also going to do good by making sure that we walk over to the compost and throw our organic waste in that. It just aligns with the company ethos. So those are the biggest tailwinds that we have, and it definitely helps us do the best that we can.

JACK: Can you cherry pick a few other big priorities, things that you're pushing along that you're proud of as a team?

ZACH: We've got teams on the ground in every location who are passionate about living a sustainable life themselves. How can we use that passion to help Monday as a company as a whole and be a little bit more cohesive with monday's goals? We're in the process of aligning our goals as a company with what we can do on the Green Team, and amplify those efforts to get more people involved, to align more closely with the company goals.

The hardest part for us is just getting engagement. People are ready to engage, but it's also going to take them away from their day job. So where we are looking to do more is getting more of the workforce engaged and having that engagement roll up to those like OKRs, those company goals that we have for ourselves in reducing emissions, aligning with our ESG goals and so forth.

One thing that's really helping us right now is piloting Mammoth Climate, and we’re finding that the uptake and the engagement from our fellow monday employees has been amazing. There's been some great shout outs already about people who have learned new things, done new things, changed habits because of what they're getting from the Mammoth platform.

That is the type of thing we'll continue to try to do more, is meet people where they are and align what they're doing with what we're doing as a company. The biggest challenge is making it not necessarily top down or bottom up, but the right combination of both of those things.

JACK: Yes, that's the holy grail. We had an audience question–if there were two or three things that you think the monday leadership structure is doing really well to empower your Green Team?

ZACH: Our own messaging is coalescing around our goal of being a good corporate global citizen. So we recently had our first ever virtual user conference during the week of Earth Day. So it was an easy decision, we made it Earth Day specific. All of the client use cases that were presented were clients that are in some way planet positive and they're using monday to support those planet positive initiatives.

We also partnered with another Canadian startup, Flash Forest who's reseeding places that have been burnt by forest fires. monday is putting its thought leadership, its position in the market, as well as frankly our dollars towards these types of initiatives, which is amazing. monday leadership deserves all the kudos for being involved in that and for leading the way there.

The other thing is we've never had any pushback from people saying how does this help our bottom line? This is something that we're passionate about as individuals and also as a company, so it's been pretty easy to get the sign-off that we need to do the things that we want to do. I am grateful to work for a company that is thinking along those lines.

We all have a long way to go in terms of being more sustainable, but we're not facing any headwinds or pushback from the corporation as we take those steps that we want to take. In our context, in this dialogue, it sounds like such a given, but it's not.

JACK: We've talked a lot about what's going well, because there's a lot going on. Let's say you could do what you so wish and restructure. How would you evolve the ERG mechanism at monday?

ZACH: I think that there's a lot of stuff that we can do to change behaviors that are driving Scope 3 emissions. Making it the default that people use greener options to get to the office, even if that means some money from monday that subsidizes those efforts. Helping people make the right decisions as far as their food choices when they leave the office, use of single-use plastics.

And then if we could have a little bit more control over our own facilities and our sites, which we quite frankly just don't because of the nature of our leases and the way that we have our space, we could be a little bit more deliberate about the way that lights are used in the office and the way that we cool the office. Our building is not bad by any means, we did a good job selecting a building that was pretty much aligned with our goals, but there's obviously room for improvement, and it's a little bit out of our hands at the moment, unfortunately, to be able to make those big sweeping changes.

But that's where I think we can do a lot of stuff as individuals to do our part to reduce what we can reduce, and balance out what we can't manage.

JACK: Are there any mechanisms of incentive that exist for you to spend all this time off the side of your desk? Is it a part of your review cycle?

ZACH: It's not a part of any formalized mechanisms. Even if it were held against me, I think I'd still be doing it. It's just really important to me and I think to everybody else, I didn't get into it thinking that there would be any type of career reward or otherwise. There's a lot of support across both management and the peers for this type of thing, but it's not something that's part of our reward structure.

I will say for people who are thinking about getting involved with Green Teams and are wondering if this would help them, I do think it's raised my level of personal brand and recognition within the organization. So it's not as if it's acting in any way to my detriment. And this is a shameless self-brag, but just in case it's helpful for other people to hear, that Earth Day keynote speaker was Adrian Grenier, the actor from Entourage. Because I'm the person who's most sustainably minded in the New York office, I was asked to interview him.

So I did get to do something pretty cool as far as our Earth Day programming, I wouldn't have been able to do it otherwise. I'm bringing my whole self to work. This is the way I operate at home. My wife and kids are de facto Green Team members. I didn't get into it for the career recognition, and I don't think anybody is, but it's not hurting.

JACK: That's awesome. Well, we're just at a time, I wish we had more. Zach. Thanks for taking the time to chat.

ZACH: Thank you, Jack. It's my pleasure. Have a great day, everybody.

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