Which sustainable typology is your business?

Employees and investors alike are demanding their companies do better in regards to sustainability. With new government legislations to make companies greener, now is the time to act. But what are businesses doing to achieve this?

Moneypenny, in partnership with WORKTECH, has written a report identifying the four different types of sustainable organisations in order to help legal firms establish where they currently stand in regards to sustainability and how they can improve.

Moneypenny’s Head of Legal Sector, Bernadette Bennett, said “This collection of organisational typologies shows a move away from the office being the only place to work, the growing conscience of the employee to be more sustainable, as well as pressure from the consumer for greener habits. For legal firms eager to improve their sustainable work practices, we hope our sustainability report can help them categorise their habits and get them thinking about the wider impact of more sustainable choices.”

Below are the four typologies highlighted in Moneypenny and WORKTECH’s report:

• Place-makers: Place-making organisations are steered by strong leaders who really value sustainability. These companies usually use their offices as the base to display their green credentials. Their offices have features such as extensive recycling, smart building technology and sustainable transport options.
• Change-makers: This group is mainly office-based and encourages green habits through peer-to-peer encouragement and social support. Change-making organisations heavily support employee-led initiatives and often have ‘green champions’ to oversee sustainability changes. In this post-pandemic world, change-makers will seize the opportunity ‘return to the office’ offers to help employees embrace more green behaviours.
• Choice-givers: Organisations that fall into the choice-giver category use new ways of working as well as flexible work policies to give their employees the choice to work where they would like and make more sustainable choices. These sustainable choices include home working to reduce travel and therefore reduce their carbon footprint.
• Arbitrators: Those that fall into this category are extending their sustainability efforts beyond the workplace and into the wider community. Although they might have less people working from the office, these organisations still feel they have a corporate responsibility to their employees and therefore offer things such as subsidised transport, home energy solutions and green initiatives for the community.

Which typology is Moneypenny?

WORKTECH’s report has a look at how Moneypenny performs in regards to the four types and found that it has traits from each of the typologies.

Bernadette continues with “Building our own HQ with environmental goals such as ground source heat pumps and recycled rainwater in mind makes us a place-maker. However, we can also be considered a change-maker as we have an employee-led initiative called ‘Ecopennies’ – a group that champions green habits in the workplace including car sharing and turning down the heating to reduce the carbon footprint of the building.

“Having invested in improving our tech to make hybrid working a success, we could be labelled as a choice-giver. One innovative tech release from us has been our world-first integration with Microsoft Teams, which allows us to transfer calls to clients wherever they are across multiple devices. Finally, by engaging with the community and planting trees to offset our UK carbon emissions, we are also an arbitrator.

“Sustainability is a serious discussion for legal firms, and this report shows how we wish to engage with the market and start a conversation around its many angles.”

To read the report and find out more, click here to download.