Earth Day provides the ideal opportunity to reflect on your personal and professional impact on the world. As populations and businesses grow across the world, prioritising environmental and social impact becomes even more essential.
Why should you review your business’s impact?
Alongside the growing need for responsible and ethical business practices, potential customers, clients, and talent are more conscious of their choices of employers and suppliers than ever before.
Whether you’re hoping to grow your business with amazing recruits and experts and retain them for as long as possible or attract new customers and clients to choose your business or brand above competitors, focussing on your impact can help you raise yourself to the next level in the eyes of those who matter most.
As a coworking and office space provider, Hub Australia has embedded impact, both environmental and social, in all business practices, becoming a leader of the industry and helping members across the country reduce their own environmental impact.
Hub also uses impact as a tool to attract and retain the best staff, with programs in place to support volunteering initiatives and help team members share their skills and passion.
1. Learn about your carbon footprint
Every action and choice likely results in an environmental impact, also known as ‘carbon output’ and greenhouse gas emissions. Whether it’s an email, how you choose to get to work, where you base your office, or how you power that office, everything contributes to your business’s overall carbon footprint.
In 2020, Hub Australia became the first Australian coworking provider to be carbon neutral certified as a service and organisation, pursuing carbon neutral certification from Government-led initiative Climate Active, Australia’s most rigorous and credible carbon neutral certifier.
To complete this, Hub reviewed every aspect of the business, adopting new technologies and operations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible and purchasing carbon offset credits to support positive projects.
For members, this means they can work each day in a carbon neutral certified office space, and use the benefits to attract and retain the best staff.
2. Review your supply chain
By choosing to work with ethical and environmentally conscious suppliers, you can ‘put your money where your mouth is’ and ensure you’re supporting people and brands that share your business’s values.
For many business leaders, this can look like buying locally, choosing the right workspace, forecasting purchases to buy in bulk (saving on shipping impact and normally allowing fewer upfront costs), changing energy suppliers to renewable sources where possible, and ensuring you support recycling programs that are evidence-based.
3. Hold yourself accountable
At Hub Australia, environmental impact has been ingrained in our core values and commitments since the business began, with a key certification as one of Australia’s first B Corp businesses.
By having external and internal accountability, all business decisions are held against measurements of impact, with a passionate team working to continually reduce environmental impact in every aspect of the business.
As a business, you can make internal frameworks and commitments to ensure you are continuously measuring and adapting your impact, and communicate your goals and commitments to your clients and customers to ensure external accountability.
Read more: Why B Corporation Certified Businesses are Changing the World
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