These days, as I see it, the subject of sustainability has been adopted by all companies. Many are already implementing associated activities: the spectrum ranges from individual initiatives that reduce material waste or plastic consumption to comprehensive environmental protection programs.
But what are you to do if the company is only getting started? When the issue came up of drawing up a sustainability roadmap for T-Systems, I first thought about myself. I like to spend my free time outdoors in nature with my two children. Seeing the effect of the environment on me led me to change my own behavior. I was all the more motivated to use the much greater potential that we have as a company of our category to achieve something. We can reduce the ecological footprint of our company processes, accelerate the sustainability journey of our customers through changing their processes, and facilitate various environmentally friendly business models with our IT solutions.
Even if it appeared especially worthwhile to support our customers on their journey to more sustainability, beginning first with T-Systems was necessary. Our consulting team from Detecon helped us to understand the initial situation at T-Systems. From this, we deduced a clear commitment and plan of action to reduce our own emissions to net zero by 2030 and completely by 2040. One of our first specific measures: avoiding disposable plastic. In addition, we joined the Climate Neutral Data Center Pact. What counted was not waiting for final figures but instead simply taking the first step.
It was clear from the start: we need fast decisions for fast successes. And for this, lean processes are needed. We have a two-person team working on this subject. The team engages in virtual exchanges with a larger group of employees from the various departments of T-Systems.
We get great ideas in this way, ensure fast implementation, and establish continuous responsibility for sustainability in every part of the organization. We take the specific requirements and circumstances of the business departments and local units into account in this respect.
In addition, agile working has helped us to initiate new learning processes and realize results step-by-step on our journey. A central approach is essential for uniform understanding and common methods. This also helps the team in the practical implementation of its own motivation on-site or the creation of new incentives. An efficient way of tackling challenges that we have transferred to other implementation projects.
One challenge in acting sustainably as a company: choosing the appropriate measures among many options. Based on our current ecological footprint and the comparison with the data of companies of equal rank, we have determined the most promising starting points and areas with the fastest potential implementation and high visibility. In this way, we could tackle the challenge holistically and simultaneously ensure fast results. This also includes visualizing our goals at the workplace: after we had worked out how we could achieve a long-term improvement in our actions, we determined our obligations in the Board of Management and communicated them. For us, what counted here was sensitizing our employees and informing them transparently of our specific emissions and the plan of action.
The good news: no one is alone on this journey. We support our customers in making more deliberate use of precious resources and expediting sustainable development. We see that we all share the same challenges in the conversion process. This currently includes a better understanding and management of CO2 emissions along the entire value chain (Scope 3). For this purpose, we communicate with analysts and consultants to coordinate our assumptions and methods with each other. We actively engage with subjects like compensation and the benefits of new technologies to improve our services. Here, we rely on developing new solutions jointly with our customers to manage the great challenges in front of us. The next great challenge.
While we are aware of our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions and are well on the way to reducing these to net zero, the understanding and management of Scope 3 emissions is in my view our greatest current joint challenge. Just considering our own pollutant emissions and switching from fossil to green energy is simply not enough. We must ensure that we keep an eye on emissions along the entire value chain and reduce them comprehensively. This will only work if all parties involved cooperate along the chain.
The key to a successful sustainability strategy? The agreement of the employees. Because it is they who make the company special. Bearing in mind that it is the employees who make the company special is vital. The acceptance and also the readiness for a change to more environmental protection in the workforce are great. However, I sometimes have the impression that employees are waiting for a central decision and mandatory changes instead of taking the initiative themselves. Communication is what helps here: we set great store on awareness and understanding. We use gamification during training related to sustainability, we listen attentively to our employees and react to their ideas. At the same time, we try to implement fast and visible changes in our daily business. I am impressed by how our employees at our international locations - for example, in Brazil, Hungary, and Spain - expedite change internally and serve as examples.
Our efforts are already bearing fruit. What motivates me is what we can do for the world if we reduce our own CO2 footprint. The commitment for our customers is already having a great effect: there are already fantastic examples where we can experience sustainable action in practice. We have used our knowledge in the field of digitalization to facilitate environmentally-friendly water management in Diepholz with the help of an IoT solution. We helped the city of Gijón to become a smart city – with intelligent lighting management for the optimal use of resources. A social sustainability project based on the Open Telekom Cloud is likewise celebrating initial successes: Telekom’s public cloud offer. And thanks to our contribution, the Chinese megacity Huainan is saving more than five megatons of CO2 emissions annually.
The way our virtual sustainability team expedites this process in everyday work, learns new things, and includes the entire company and our customers makes me especially proud.
We will continue to work tirelessly to reduce the CO2 footprint of T-Systems - along the entire value chain. This not only means striving for a better understanding and holistic management of Scope 3 emissions, but also making a targeted start with our own emissions. For example, with the decision only to use e-cars as company cars from May 2022.
In addition, we will expand our portfolio with a focus on offers that empower our customers to more environmental protection. We want to utilize the unique opportunity to protect the environment with our solutions. We will accompany our customers with complete transparency in finding the right starting points, converting modes of working, or even configuring complete sections of their business models so that they become sustainable companies.
Our focus here is on the people: we will continue to communicate openly and involve our employees on our journey. This also includes reporting actively on wonderful intermediate results - as motivation for our common goal.
