“Unitees want to be a part of it.”

How do you manage to put all that into place at Unite? And what have been your biggest challenges so far?

We have the support of our company board, which is so important! In fact, there’s been a shift throughout the whole company. For instance, we agreed that our Environmental Sustainability Team gets to spend 10% of its work time on sustainability-related campaigns.

There’s also a lot of interest outside the team – many people will come to us to offer their support. Rather than being mere bystanders, they want to help shape what we do.

It can be challenging not knowing if a campaign will generate interest or not. A low attendance could, for instance, be traced back to our flexible work models and many employees working from home that day. There’s a variety of reasons that can determine the success of a campaign. We’ll only be able to reap what we sow further down the road.

How does your work impact individuals and corporate culture?

Sustainability is getting more and more attention. It starts with conversations in the staff kitchen with questions like “What’s the proper way to dispose of my tea bags?”. In the office, we’re constantly discussing sustainability issues that we’ve heard about in the news.

Sustainability is one of our core company values. As such, it’s at the core of each process at Unite. It also gets us more involved as a team.

So how do you even begin?

At first, we wanted to tackle the issues with the biggest impact. But when you’re starting out, that’s too much to ask – especially when you consider how many departments have a say in the matter.  

I recommend starting simple and working your way up the complexity ladder. First, you need to get motivated people in your company involved in your campaigns.  

Your next step is to try to reach the ones with more of a stand-offish attitude. It’s about convincing them by being transparent and respectful rather than lecturing them. State the reasons for what you’re doing and use examples to show why certain ways of doing things are better than others. 

What’s the Environmental Sustainability Team working on next?

Because we operate across 13 European countries besides Germany, we’d like to have one sustainability ambassador in each country. The goal is for them to run small sustainability campaigns at their own location. 

Eventually, we want to introduce sustainability metrics so we can measure our progress in all areas of the company. 

There’s also another campaign called ‘Mobility Week’ coming up in September. We’re still working out the details, but we’re planning to include a driver safety course.