It’s very easy nowadays to be caught up in the flurry of lip-service surrounding net zero and carbon neutral events. In the last two years, the events industry paradigm has shifted from live to virtual, back to ‘normal’, then back to this ‘other’ new normal we call ‘hybrid’. It’s an exciting time for event profs, especially those of us working in event tech, but together, as an industry, we are grappling with a new huge issue: sustainability.
The reality of the world of work these days is that establishing an ESG/CSR strategy is no longer a choice. We simply must care about it. That’s why I was more than happy to tackle this head on with the wider company when our US colleagues were in town a couple of weeks ago. Our CEO asked me to lead a session that will help us establish a strategy for Glisser that the whole company can get behind.
It made me wonder, in this modern day age of B2C - consumers are starting to make very conscious decisions about where their money is going. Translating that into a work context, why should we care about ESG? Simply, that we should all want to represent a brand that is doing good things - and our customers do too. Good things for people, planet and profit.
It’s been a while since I have written about the ‘triple bottom line’. As a sustainability graduate, it really is textbook stuff - but extremely important, and a starting point. Put simply, in contrast to conventional business norms, this concept aims to:
1) do something for people (internal and external)
2) do something for the planet
3) don’t forget about profit
As a company, we want to be making scalable commitments to sustainability and positive societal outcomes - avoiding greenwashing or hot air. This is what Glisser is all about.
Glisser’s Triple Bottom Line:
It was tremendously useful to get the whole company together to discuss our plans for the future. We are an agile, progressive and thoughtful bunch - and when running this session, I wanted to enable that to shine through. For me, it’s rare you get the opportunity to make an extensive difference in a company - on the day, we spoke for an hour - we discussed the companies we like to represent as consumers, the purpose of ESG, and most importantly, we brainstormed ideas around how we can make scalable changes to bottom line initiatives to establish Glisser’s own ESG strategy.
Together, we made some commitments to achieve by Q4 this year:
- Enable all employees to take off one day a year to complete charity work, volunteer or give back to their local communities
- Replace Amazon voucher incentive schemes with charitable donations on their behalf
- Replace competition prizes with donations or vouchers from B Corp retailers
- Refine and finalise our D&I initiatives
There are some long term plans as well… we had a very detailed chat about how we can effectively carbon offset events using our unique SaaS platform, and even spoke in detail about technical debt and moving servers.
We are determined to make sure this strategy goes beyond lip-service. Our team has been hard at work building our very own event carbon calculator too, designed to show organisers just how much carbon they can save by moving even just a portion of their attendees online. More to come on this soon.
Among these social and environmental initiatives, I think this is a tremendously exciting time to be at Glisser, and we’re looking forward to spreading the word of the huge commitments we are making to ESG - to our new staff, customer base, and anyone else who will listen within the event industry!
Be one of the first to access Glisser's event carbon calculator when it launches later this month - register here. Find our more about our award-winning virtual and hybrid event platform here.
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