How Businesses Can Become Sustainable This Big Energy Saving Week
January is tough. The post-Christmas blues set in, the weather reaches its coldest point and arguments over turning up the thermostat are in full swing. This is where the Big Energy Saving Week comes in to help, and with energy prices almost doubling, this year’s is especially critical.
Big Energy Saving Week is 17 – 22 January 2022 and it focuses on raising public awareness on how to make homes more energy efficient, highlights discounts and explains how to switch energy supplier or tariff to get the best deal. Now in its eighth year, the Big Energy Saving Week is a partnership between Citizens Advice Bureau, The Energy Saving Trust and Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy with the support of numerous organisations, charities and companies
It’s important to regularly check in with how we’re using energy. There are always more things we can do to become more sustainable and help save the environment through everyday actions. Big Energy Saving Week is the perfect time to consider greener choices, and while we’re checking things at home, why not look at how your business could be more sustainable too? After all, making sustainable choices at work may influence employees to make greener choices at home.
Becoming a Sustainable Business in Just Three Steps
There are three steps businesses can take to become more sustainable:
1) Measure the impact your business is having on the environment. Use data to measure areas of your business that could be optimised. This can be through travel data and learning if employees are making sustainable choices when booking or using preferred partners.
2) Once you have visibility over your travel and expense data, you can then adapt policy and put rules in place to enforce it. Review your policy regularly to make sure it’s still relevant and aligns to your business and your sustainability goals. Then add controls into the travel and expense process to ensure employees are spending within policy and enabling them to make sustainable choices.
3) When you have updated the business’ policy and the relevant controls are in place, you can begin to influence behaviour and help employees make the best choices before, during and after work trips. Inform and educate your employees by giving them options when they book and tell them the environmental impact of the trip at the time of booking to help them make greener choices. Businesses can also offset employees carbon footprint by using tools that’ll make it as easy as a click of a button.
Taking SAP Concur Solutions on Your Sustainability Journey
Our solutions will be able to aid sustainability by helping you to make the best choices for both your business and the environment. Concur Travel enables you to highlight sustainable partners, communicate sustainability initiatives and guide employees towards greener travel at every stage of their trip. SAP Concur trip companion, TripIt has the capability to show employees their carbon footprint, while keeping all the details of their trip in one, easy to use app that’s completely paperless. Businesses use Intelligence to gather data insights into carbon emissions, top destinations, green suppliers and more, so you can gain visibility and work out where changes should be made. Finally, Concur Request enables businesses to put rules in place to meet unique travel needs and make sure sustainability is built into your travel and expense spending policies.
There is always more businesses can do to become more sustainable, and Big Energy Saving Week is the perfect opportunity to review policies and make greener choices which can be rolled out company-wide. To see where you rank on sustainable travel, take our quiz!