The Massive Power of Earthforce

Jack Bruner, co-founder of Mammoth Climate, sat down with Antoine Cabot, Earthforce Canada President and Senior Director of Product Management, to learn how Salesforce embeds sustainability into its operations and the various ways it empowers its employees to do good for the planet.

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: Why don't you tell us a little bit about what your organization does, what your role is full-time, and what the green team structure is at Salesforce?

ANTOINE: Salesforce is the number one CRM solution, customer relationship management software. We are the world's fastest growing enterprise software company, it's a huge organization. We have 75,000 employees, and still growing every year. I've been at Salesforce for more than three years now, and I'm a product manager as part of our automation platform. I'm based in the beautiful Vancouver Islands, and I'm also the president for Earthforce Canada. In my spare time, I created an organization called Climate Product Leaders. I published a playbook last year called How to Become a Climate Conscious Product Manager. So, I've been pretty busy working on automation with Salesforce and also driving a lot of sustainability efforts on the side.

JACK: Busy day and night you've got there. Maybe we can zoom in on Earthforce and give context to its stage, scale, and level of maturity. How many members are in Earthforce relative to the workforce size, how long has it been around? And if there is a stated goal or mission for Earthforce, how would you describe it?

ANTOINE: Earthforce is one of our employee resource groups that I believe Salesforce pioneered 20 years ago. The company was started in 1999, and I believe they started with this idea of creating employee resources group where employees can just connect on specific topics that they are interested in. We have 14 or 15 different employee resource groups at this point, Earthforce, is the largest one with 15,000 members.

I want to make sure that it’s actually separate from our sustainability team. We have a group of people at Salesforce working full time on our sustainability efforts, making sure that we reduce carbon emissions coming from our data centers, our buildings, looking at our Scope 1, Scope 2, Scope 3 emissions. All of that is managed by a team of professionals that we call the sustainability team, that operates separately from Earthforce. Earthforce is really this employee resource group.

The mission for us is that we believe in being better people for the planet, and creating a better planet for all people. We drive sustainable and equitable change within our communities because it is a business imperative to take climate action now. We need to make sure that our employees are committed to the cause and they are making efforts on fighting climate change.

JACK: 15,000 members is monstrous, and I think you'd mentioned in a previous chat that it's a growing figure by 10-15% every single year. But no two ERGs are the same, everyone's got a different collection of individuals who come from different roles, different departments, and have different skill sets. What's your ERG's strength? Where have you been most effective at driving action or seeing outcomes? As a group, as a team, what are some of the tailwinds maybe helping you do that?

ANTOINE: One thing that is really helping us, especially specifically this year, is a strong commitment from the company overall to help more in terms of volunteering hours. Salesforce is one of the co-founders of something called the 1-1-1 model. We have 17,000 companies that have joined the movement so far, and the idea is that the company is giving 1% of equity, 1% of time, and then 1% of product to nonprofit organizations.

When Salesforce started this model 20 years ago, those numbers were small, but now they are huge. Just to give you a sense, this year we're going to commit to 1.4 million hours of volunteering. For one single company, one single year. The goal is to reach 10 million hours all time. It is a game changer for us as a resource, because more people are willing to spend more time with us planting more trees, learning about carbon footprints or protecting biodiversity.

That really helps us because it comes from the top as one of the big company objectives. Another metric we're tracking is the participation level, which has to be at 75% this year. So out of the 75,000 employees at Salesforce, 75% of them need to have done some volunteering work by the end of the year. It's a huge commitment and that really helped us to drive more appetite for more people to come to us and say, I need to do a volunteering event for my team, I have 20 people available for two hours, give me something to do. And I'm like, oh yeah, okay, let's plant trees, let's learn about something related to sustainability. That's a very strong tailwind that helps us drive more engagement.

JACK: You mentioned that the core full-time focused sustainability team is distinct in goal setting and outcomes from the ERG. It sounds like this top level target of volunteering hours comes maybe right from the top.

ANTOINE: Yes, it comes from Marc Benioff. It helps you progress, helps you set goals and have a target to trend toward. I think a lot of ERGs are missing that. They have passion and intent and in a sense, need guidance on where to focus it and what the goal should be. The way I think about this is very much like in the real world. Climate activism movements come from the grassroots, people join groups, go together to do things with sustainability.

But, if you don't have the political support from the top, it just doesn't go far enough, and that's where we're very lucky at Salesforce. We have that support from the top that says if you can do more, do more, because we really want the company to have an impact on sustainability. This is one of our core values, so we really need to shine in terms of sustainability outside of Salesforce through our volunteering efforts.

JACK: I’m curious about initiatives, things that you've run effectively. I know there's a lot, so maybe you could cherry pick a few out.

ANTOINE: One thing that we've been pretty, Pretty big in the past, I would say, five, six years have been our 1T.org initiative. You can go onto the website 1T.org. The objective is to plant 1 trillion trees by 2030. Salesforce has already planted 52 million trees so far. And we are working with a lot of many, many partners out there to reach that goal of 1 trillion trees. That has been one of our big objectives as volunteering activities was to plant trees, which is great because it's a great way to get people together in person, doing team activities, etc. But we also realized that this is not enough. Of course, you can always plant trees, but some of them will eventually be destroyed because of wildfires and everything, so it's not enough.

This year, we're starting a new initiative that I'm a big believer in, which is called Sustainability Storytellers. The idea is to open up a new training program that any employee can join, customer-facing or non-customer-facing. If you have an interest in sustainability, you can join the training, and then you can learn about all the sustainability basics, like the state of the world, where we are in terms of biodiversity, the planetary boundaries, all that stuff. So at least you get that understanding of where we are. Then you start learning about how we can speak about this to our customers. We have a very large base of customers, as you can imagine, being in this business for 20 years.

So we have this massive opportunity to impact our customers as well and make sure that they understand where they are, how they will reach net zero by 2030, 2040, 2050, based on their industry, based on their vertical, based on their efforts, etc. We have a product called Net Zero Cloud that we position to our customers to track their carbon emissions. But that's not all, we also want to tell them what's the current state, what's the impact on biodiversity, even if it's not tracked yet in any of their ESG reporting. So that's one of the big benefits, training more people, training more employees, so that they can become sustainability advocates to our customers.

JACK: Literacy is the most common thread between all these four conversations we've been able to have. In some way. The ERG always gets delegated a component of it. It makes so much sense because you’re working bottom up and you need to tell that story in a way that's personalized, that's relevant to them. It's very validating to hear that you are, also.

ANTOINE: Climate literacy is everything. Many people come to me and ask, how do I start? How do I start my sustainability journey inside Salesforce, outside Salesforce? My answer is always read. Read real books about sustainability. Read books about how we need to reduce our consumption model. That's how you learn about the problem and that's how you can come up with great solutions.

JACK: The impact and scale of the work you do within Earth Force is huge. Of course, there's lots going well, but I'd be remiss if we didn't talk about the room for improvement.

ANTOINE: I'm a big believer that every Salesforce employee can become a climate activist. I think that's just because we can never do enough internally to activate that consciousness of being aware of the problem and trying to do something that can solve those big problems. What I've seen working at Salesforce for the past four years is that people are amazing. Our employees are always willing to do good around them, they're always willing to help solve a problem, work or non-work related.

I feel that at the end, if we are able to activate them and help them speak to the customers about this problem, we can have a massive impact. I think about 75,000 people, well-educated, very aware of the problem, speaking around them about the problem, who can have an impact on millions of people, and not only in North America, but also Europe, Asia Pacific. We have people all around the world. Sustainability is one of our core values, so I strongly believe that we're on the right path. It's going to take years, but there is a great, great, great opportunity there.

JACK: Do you have any tangibles, anything you're reading right now or anything you'd recommend?

ANTOINE: I would say Less Is More by Jason Hickel. Another one someone shared with me that was almost right at the beginning of my journey was called The Day the World Stopped Shopping by J.B. MacKinnon. Very, very interesting book about consumption structures.

The other that I always think about offering is Project Drawdown. It’s super accessible, but also lots of good data, and they're league leaders. I think it's called the most comprehensive playbook for climate action.

JACK: I have one last question for you, Antoine. You've got 15,000 members in EarthForce, it's growing 5%, 10% year over year. There's passion and interest and desire driving people to come and join, but I'm wondering if there are any other elements yet, or if it's being considered to incentivize people at Salesforce to join ERGs like Earthforce. Is there any compensation layer, any sort of annual review where you get a little bump or any sort of incentive beyond the passion that you have for the problem to join? And do you think there should be?

ANTOINE: There is no financial incentive, it's all based on passion, but there is a very strong governance model. You can't operate ERGs at that scale if you don't have a strong governance model. We have a global chair that is operating worldwide, that is managing the budget, and then we have regional hubs. We have regions for North America, for Europe. Then we have a chair as well at the regional level that is responsible for dispatching the budgets across the hubs. And then we have the hubs that are country-wide, Canada is one hub, but we also have hubs per city like San Francisco, New York. Those hubs are passionate volunteers or passionate individuals who are willing to run events that are related to sustainability.

So you need that strong governance model in order to operate properly. If you join the global chair, then they are very clear that you need to allocate some percentage of your time to these codes, so that needs to be discussed with your manager. It's up to your manager to decide if this will have any benefit at the end for your year. I think it's a great learning opportunity, it's a great leadership opportunity. So many people are willing to do it because that's going to make them grow in their own passion, but that's much more on the personal side than driving your career and climbing the ladder within Salesforce.

One of the benefits is that you get exposed to various senior leaders. You can eventually meet with our CTO, our CPO, people that you don't work closely with on your day-to-day job. Being part of the ERG gives you access to those people. That on its own is one of those door opening incentives that is hard to quantify, but is very real. The book I wrote last year, I advertised it internally into our technology and product organization, and now I'm kind of becoming the expert in product management about sustainability.

So just making sure that what you do has an impact overall in your organization is important. You can always bring things into your work, and that's going to resonate and that's going to make people think about you when there will be a decision related to sustainability later on.

JACK: We show up at work not because necessarily we want to every single day, but because we're there to do a job. And if this is part of that job, then maybe it can in some way connect to an incentive structure.

ANTOINE: I joined Salesforce because sustainability was one of the core values. That was the reason why I decided to go with Salesforce instead of any other big tech company, because they have this strong commitment to sustainability. Our CEO is giving a lot of money to help the oceans. We speak a lot about sustainability internally, which is fantastic.

JACK: That's super powerful to hear. Antoine, we're out of time, but this was amazing as always.

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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