Applying the Go Green Lens to Business as Usual

Jack Bruner, co-founder of Mammoth Climate, sat down with Tara Brown, Senior Director of Corporate Responsibility at Jack Henry, 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: Today, we are joined by Tara Brown, who is the Senior Director of Corporate Responsibility at Jack Henry. For today's session, our goal is to pick Tara's brain and glean some insights as to how she's built an effective ERG at Jack Henry and hopefully leave you all with some tactics, some things that you can do with your team to refine and improve on operations on the Green Team. 

Tara, it's so nice to see you again. At the very top, why don't you tell us a little bit about what Jack Henry does and what your role is focused on?

TARA: So glad to be here. Jack Henry is a financial service technology company, we help support banks and credit unions in serving their account holders with technology. Our purpose is all about financial health and wellness and creating more health in that space through the products and services that we provide to banks and credit unions. 

My role for Jack Henry is corporate responsibility at large, and climate is a big part of that. Climate-related risks, greenhouse gas emissions, our pursuit of a low-carbon future. Along with that, I also help lead our corporate ethics program, philanthropy, and then all of our public disclosures in this space. No shortage of good work to be done.

JACK: You’re supported in your core sustainability practice by a really effective Green Team operation that goes by the name of Go Green. So folks understand where you're at in the timeline of the maturity cycle of an ERG, what is their size, their scale, how many members, how long they've been around? And maybe if you could summarize, what is their stated goal as an ERG distinct from yours on the Sustainability team?

TARA: A little bit of broader context. At Jack Henry, we call our ERGs Business Innovation Groups. The groups are not just designed to create connection and learning, but they also are really designed to drive innovation in our organization, plug in and help us go faster, farther with some of our initiatives. 

Go Green was launched in the summer of 2021 to help plug in our associates to be part of the change they wanted to see happen at the organization.

My team tends to need to focus on the 10,000-foot strategic initiatives, like managing our climate-related risks and opportunities, and greenhouse gas emissions. But there is a huge demand and interest from our associates to do more tangible things, to get recycling bins in our offices, to introduce vegan meals to our cafeteria, to look at our fleet of vehicles, to try and be more green there. Go Green has really played an important role there in making a reality of some of those wishlist items that my team frankly wouldn't have time to do. 

As for the scale, we are a 7,000 person company. Go Green right now is sitting around 400+ associates. We've had several additional folks join this month in honor of Earth Month, so we're closer to about 500 now, and it’s a very, very engaged group of folks.

JACK: What types of work the Go Green team has been effective in taking off your plate and running with? Where's their strength been? Where's their power lie so far?

TARA: They have been very effective at plugging into some of our other teams' work. For example, they've worked really closely with our travel team when it was time to decide what to do with our fleet of vehicles. Do we replace them? Do we go electric? They helped build an effective business case around purchasing hybrid vehicles, which is a step in the right direction for us as an organization. I think the power there is they're plugging into work that is already happening, and they're introducing that green lens. 

We also have a handful of office locations where landscaping is happening. They came to the facilities team and said, let us do the research and design a native pollinator garden, it'll save the company money and it'll be better for the environment. That isn’t something that our facilities team really had the bandwidth to go and do, but you've got the passion of associates that want to see the change. 

The strategy has been to plug them into some of our existing business functions and let them introduce that green lens. It's been very effective.

JACK: For those ERG members that have the passion, they're layering on something new and beneficial, but I could also see the other side of being received in a way that's maybe you're adding work, maybe politically there's some sensitivities. Has that been a factor at all?

TARA: Of course, you never want to be perceived as adding work, or telling a group that has expertise, here's how to do it better. It has boiled down to having really good relationships across the business, making sure that we know we're working toward a common goal together as an organization, which is to be a responsibly run company that is committed to the environment. 

So they've spent a lot of time building those relationships with facilities, travel, tech services. Their goal is to help make business decisions, save the company money, help us be more efficient and be more green. Business leaders have a hard time arguing when you say, let me figure out some ways to help save some money.

JACK: The Green Team structure, when it's given the right directive, can have such a powerful, bottom-up positive force on all the political nature because you can gradually see the dollars and cents of some of this activity.

TARA: Just to add to that thought, the Go Green group reports officially into my team at Office of Corporate Sustainability, but their executive sponsor is our CFO, who is an incredible champion for this work. It lends a lot of credibility to the fact that this can be a smart business decision. This is something that can save us money, avoid potential spend. She's done an incredible job of guiding the group and tapping the rudder to say, let's stay business focused here. That has been very, very effective, I think, for the group to have somebody at that level helping champion some of these causes.

JACK: Let's say you had a magic wand and you could improve, fix, or restructure the ERG to be as effective as it possibly could be to build the culture of climate action that you foresee needing to be there for the achievement of your net zero goals. How would you rewrite the script?

TARA: It is a very, very leanly operated team. There isn't anyone saying, here's a couple grand, go do what you want. It is really building a case for how to spend the money well.

I think if we had additional funding, it would be useful to compensate leadership, because many of our leaders are senior leaders of our Go Green team. These are established, well-respected folks out in business that are taking on additional responsibilities. They do it because it's a passion project. 

One of my worries is burnout. You put in so much heart to it. How are you creating a sustainable leadership structure? Having some funds just to say, hey, thank you, I think could go a long way. Or, investing in their education, saying, let's go to this conference, let's figure out how to do this differently, better, learn from others. I think that would be a wish list item.

JACK: Compensation is the cleanest and most obvious way to incentivize people to join and stick around and excel up the hierarchy of the ERG. Are there other ways that you've maybe considered in that incentive structure?

TARA: I do think that's partly why we have folks currently serving as volunteers in this capacity, because they are getting experiences that they may not get in their day job, like budget exposure. They're getting that hands-on experience and getting a lot of visibility. 

So I think that's an incredible experience, if you're looking to grow and stretch and build your name and do something that matters, it is an incredible opportunity. We've seen some real leaders rise up as a result of their role in all of our Business Innovation Groups.

JACK: Are there levels of the ERG that you've got to have that kind of rigor to join?

TARA: Our first round of leaders created something new here, they established governance and figured out how to determine who their successors were. We've since pulled people up the ranks that have shown an interest or been very active or shown an aptitude. We're not going to choose somebody to be in a highly visible leadership role that hasn't been involved or isn't really known to leadership.

JACK: Yeah, it's interesting because to the point earlier every ERG has its unique ingredients, it's almost as if you can assign different leadership roles.

TARA: We have an operations leader that is managing the many different projects that are going on, and then project leaders that are helping lead things along. 

One of our most important positions that we have is our communications leader, who is getting the word out and looking for ways not only to communicate to the existing associate base that's part of the group, but really thinking about how to get the message out to the broader organization, how to invite people to be part of this. 

Maybe they don't know anything, maybe they’re passionate about environmental topics, but how do you still make the sale that this is a value add for you in your job? That goal has been really, really important growing the membership base. It's so critical, and one that is not often a part of the governance structure of an ERG. 

But when you think about what a typical climate-focused ERG gets tasked with, it's literacy. It's telling the story of dissemination and the plan, our top-down of course, but also things like just the fundamentals, like the language that we're talking about, the short-term objectives we have and why.

JACK: It's almost like an internal PR team.

TARA: That's very true. I'll give an example that I thought was so brilliant that one of our leaders did. Our tech leader sends out a quarterly newsletter of all the things that are going on internally to help us do our jobs better through technology. Go Green drafted an article talking about the environmental impact difference between attaching a PDF to your email versus uploading it to the cloud and how to make greener choices and some of that.

That fits right in with this narrative that you're making behavioral micro changes, but those micro changes really add up to big change. I hope someone in the audience hears that and starts to think, oh, I've got someone who fits nicely into a communications leader. I'm happy to talk more about it if anybody wants to reach out.

JACK: You mentioned earlier that the team ultimately boils up to you. We have an audience question that is: I'm getting our company's ERG off the ground and our HR team would like it to boil up to them. I'm trying to make the push for it to report up to myself and sustainability. Any tips on what my “sales pitch” should be?

TARA: When we first launched Go Green, they reported to HR, and I served as the executive sponsor to the group. We got off to a great start, but about a year and a half or so ago, we asked what is working? Does it make sense? How similar to our other ERG structures is this? 

For us, what we figured out was very different. There's lots of commonalities with diversity-oriented ERGs, but we wanted the ability to be more nimble, to plug into different groups, like with travel and facilities, and to align with our corporate sustainability goals and climate. It just made more sense for us as an organization for it to report into me.

JACK: It’s typical for HR to be at the very least involved in getting it off the ground.

TARA: They’re involved in all of our employee engagement initiatives. It's just where the connection is the tightest is where we ultimately made the decision, it made more sense to roll into sustainability.

JACK: Yeah, it sounds like you've taken a very logical path. Sustainability very quickly becomes a very operations focused ERG, and I think that's where the gap can be found.

Tara, I want to just say thank you so much for investing time with us today. And thank you so much for all the work you're doing over there at Jack Henry and kudos to everyone on Go Green  who's making it happen.

TARA: Thank you. I love to talk about this. It's one of the best parts of my job, just to see the impact our group is making. So thanks for the opportunity.

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