Clarke is one of the candidates in the Earth Hour Award and I got the pleasure of interviewing him for my blog: 1. At the moment you have the highest score of the people's choice for the categorie Workplace Champions, do you think you have a good chance you are going to win in a few days?
- My lead in my category is only by a handful of votes and so I think it is still very much open for anyone to win.
2. What are the 3 most important workplace champions achievements that brought you up in this competition and how did you achieve them?
– The three most important achievements we are proud of are:
1. Actively paying staff to commute green to work every day. This is a real coup, and I suspect quite unique in the workplace. Permanent staff are all entitled to a Green Bonus of up to $1,000 every six months if they travel green to work. So, for taking public transport, walking or cycling staff claim the bonus. For most who claim it, it easily covers the entire cost of their commute, making the cost difference between driving and finding a greener alternative very financially compelling.
2. 100% green (wind) power in our largest office (in Brisbane) – it is a large office with about 60 staff who work long hours, so it’s great to know that all the energy we use during the day comes from a sustainable source
3. A Company policy to promote and enable reduced carbon burning from travel. Our staff and clients are scattered throughout Australia and even beyond (Canada, Hong Kong, UK) so we have an active company policy to reduce travel and make remote working effective and this reduces our travel and carbon emissions hugely. We are all comfortable and regular users of video-conference, tele-conference, webinars, online presentations and good old email. It works very well for us and the ease with which it works has helped many other companies we do business with copy our approach. Many staff also get connected and work from home 90-100% of the time and those that do need to travel on business pay extra to off-set their carbon output.
All of our achievements came about in the same way. A few of us started talking in the office about what we could do, we did a bit of research to work out how to make it happen including the cost, people, time and other considerations and then the ideas were presented and discussed with the owners of Pareto. Fortunately, they were willing to consider the benefits and not just the cost to the business and decided that it was a worthwhile investment in our business and the environment. The strong green initiatives that exist within Pareto help to make us very proud to work for the company.
3. What kind, ot what would be your ideal environmental project you and your workmates looking for to spend your two days of volunteer leave on this year?
– We’re still looking for an ideal environmental project, so if anyone who reads this has one in the Brisbane area that we could help with please let me know. Quite a few of us went out and volunteered with the clean up after the recent floods in Brisbane, but we’re also looking for a longer term project (each staff member gets two days per year volunteer leave) that we can work on as a team so we can something together outside of the office that isn’t just a trip to the pub and leaves us with a sense of achievement.
4. To hear if you'll win you are invited to the awards night in Sydney. How will you travel there?
– I am not planning to travel to Sydney for the Awards – I have asked my manager, who is based in Sydney to attend instead.
5. The winner of the Workplace Champions Award will receive a luxury holiday package at a Resort in Port Douglas, who will you take there?
– If I win an award I will auction it amongst our staff and donate the proceeds back to Earth Hour – that makes more sense to me because I am really just the representative for my company in the awards – many staff are passionate about reducing our impact on the environment and have helped deliver all of the ‘green’ changes we have in place. And WWF certainly needs the money because there is a lot more campaigning needed still to change our current habits and save our planet.
6. And how are you going to offset your carbon footprint on this flight?
– When I do travel I typically off-set using the option the airline offers when booking. We have also used carbon sequestering companies like Greenfleet to block purchase offsets too.
Thanks Clarke, for your inspiring answers!
You can still vote for the people's choice, click here.
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