Introduction
There is a growing public demand for a rapid transition to a zero-carbon economy. Companies must take action. Decarbonization may seem like a challenging proposition to industries and businesses, but there is no way around the issue. The transition to a net-zero carbon economy – as mandated by the 2015 Paris Agreement – will continue to affect economies and society around the world. Businesses that bake carbon reduction into their strategies will see significant benefits: increased competitiveness and innovation, risk management, and growth. The rise of the hybrid workplace is indicative of changing trends that companies must take advantage in order to mitigate future uncertainty. The same holds for digital decarbonisation, and net-zero emissions goals. Beyond the very serious threats the current crisis poses to our planet, organizations are increasingly also seeing the material risks in their business.
Hybrid working and Decarbonization: Accelerating your workplace journey to a net zero.
Everyone’s responsibility
Every organization has a responsibility to become a part of the solution. Failing to do so will impact your ability to attract talent, manage risk, and innovate for growth. Market success and growth will attract organizations that are purpose-led, with a vision, mission, and brand statements talking about matters beyond the profit motive. It’s partly a result of the demands of modern society, but also because purpose-driven companies attract the best minds and have passionate employees who want to achieve and change the world in some way.
Setting your enterprise up for success in a zero-carbon future will require a transformative implementation of digital workplace solutions within the enterprise IT infrastructure. These kind of high-level, enterprise-wide structural changes demand a coherent direction with guidance from a business advisory service that can implement a digitization journey that augments, not only the enterprise experience but the decarbonisation pursuit as well. Decarbonisation and a net-zero future of work are more technically and financially feasible now than ever before. Enterprises must show a clear commitment toward their decarbonization plans and cultivate support from trusted partners/advisories with a wide range of experience is key for this endeavor.
The feasibility of decarbonization initiatives must be carefully considered, CAPEX requirements are often cited as a key barrier. Due to this, we’re seeing the emergence of digital green advisories and platforms. This is because enterprises must manage the costs and risks of implementing a permanent change to traditional processes and standards in an across-the-board fashion. A transition that is predicated on our ways of work is the current trend of hybrid working, a transformative pursuit in itself. But on top of that, enterprises must create sustainable and eco-efficient operations through significant decarbonization efforts across the supply chain in future.
For the hybrid future of work, mechanisms will be implemented where new practices, like rotational attendance, reduced office footprint, and commute, etc., are promoted as part of the enterprise’s decarbonization effort. Enterprises are encouraged to introduce hybrid ways of working with an express objective of reducing carbon footprint. Embracing the implementation of hybrid processes can even positively impact any enterprise’s decarbonization efforts. Check out another blog where I talk about a systematic change in employee experience that encompasses their end-point devices, work applications, physical workspaces, collaboration, and transportation protocols to help enterprises accelerate their journey on the net-zero roadmaps. To give you a small idea, the optimization of emails and attachment usage across enterprise communication can actually have a sizeable impact on the power usage of data servers. A message shared widely with an average-sized attachment multiplies the storage requirement from networks and data centers, creating an unnecessary energy-intensive activity. The solution? Analytics to see how people interact with content across various classifications of types and senders and suggest whom to include, and how to share the content to their respective distribution lists. A simple change of using central depositories and cloud drive links rather than individual attachments can save energy consumption.
Final word
Any fundamental change comes with opportunities and risks. For instance, there may be risks associated with increased OPEX costs due to rising energy prices, or unforeseen policy changes. However, a decisive commitment from organizations to embrace hybrid working and decarbonisation by collaborating with relevant business advisory services to augment and streamline their efforts will certainly be a step in the right direction. This is an invaluable opportunity to future-proof businesses preparing them for long-term resiliency as environmental regulations, market sentiment, and talent trends, among other things, start to change for good. To make this work, firms must be serious about their decarbonization journey and carve out a long-term energy strategy.
