Corporate sustainability…the honest way

The thing that strikes me the most about corporate sustainability is that, in one way or another, it has become a bit of a ‘buzzword’. Everyone’s talking about the best way to be sustainable and to live by sustainable values, but I believe it’s much simpler than that.

The first kind of sustainability I believe companies should be worrying about is longevity: how to become sustainable in the long run, so that your business can still exist 20 years from now.

Suggestion: Why is corporate sustainability so important?

Being sustainable as a company is key for our customers, which is why we want to achieve our 250M turnover goal: our idea of sustainability is building a business that will still be here decades from now. If you want your business to continue thriving in the future, you need to generate cash.

That’s, for me, the first sustainable item that many others are forgetting: yes, it’s definitely important for every company to worry about the environment and the footprint they’re leaving, but if you only focus on your carbon footprint without putting attention to your company’s profitability, then you won’t be sustainable at all. If you make losses, your company will inevitably die, which isn’t sustainable neither from an environmental viewpoint nor from a longevity viewpoint.

Suggestion: So, how can businesses become more sustainable?

In my opinion, corporate sustainability is a matter of being healthy. That’s the foundation of it. And then, of course, we need to be a responsible company in the 21st Century, which is a huge challenge when it comes to reducing our carbon footprint. In our industry, it’s not hard to get to zero carbon emissions: we’re a SaaS company, which means the biggest CO2 consumption we have is in our data centers. At efficy, we write efficient applications, where the memory and CPU consumption is taken into consideration. Energy-wise, we consume less data, less power, and we are working together with our data centers to make sure the energy they consume to run the data centers is actually green, renewable energy.

Before going all out on ‘big gestures’ that aim to show your company as ‘green’, a good first step towards sustainability is being as efficient as possible. Make sure to ask yourself:

• Are all of my company’s processes as seamless as they could be?
• Could we cut down on any costs or expenses?
• Is there any way we could lower our emissions?
• How can we make this process work better, faster, and deliver the best possible results?

Of course, this efficient approach will also have a positive impact on your company’s expenses, so it’s a win-win situation, regardless of how you look at it.

Let’s make it count!

With all that being said, it’s really important that every company (and citizen, because this is an issue that affects all of humanity!) understands that we need to act. It’s just hygiene -- we need corporate sustainability to stop being a ‘trend’ or a ‘buzzword’ and normalize it. It’s an almost mandatory aspect of business and should be as normal and expected as paying taxes.

The responsibility of taking care of the environment is in everyone’s hands (although particularly in the government’s hands), but our duty as companies is to make sure we’re not harming the environment and making things worse than they already are. 

If you'd like to continue on this journey, check out these stories:

• Blog  9: All about M&A.