Month: June 2023

Originally published in GoDaddy’s 2022 Sustainability Report

Talent Management

We’re fostering a culture of learning and engagement.

GoDaddy’s foundation rests upon the incredible people who devote their time, talent and energy to working here. That’s why we take a human- centered approach focused on individual, whole- person needs, and we are continually evolving.

In the remote and hybrid work environments of today, we foster employee connections and community through two of our successful employee engagement programs — the GoDaddy Fun Fund provides a budget for employees to enjoy morale-boosting opportunities for themselves and their teams. We also have Everyday Champions, our global recognition program that enables connection across our global workforce, allowing employees to recognize and celebrate their coworkers’ successes.

Awards and Honors

Comparably 2022 Awards: Best Company for Career Growth  BestCompaniesAZ: Arizona’s 2022 Most Admired Companies

Employee Feedback

At GoDaddy, we love to learn from our employees. Through GoDaddy Voice — our annual employee engagement survey — we ask employees for their feedback to understand what is working and to identify opportunities for improvement.

In 2022, we conducted GoDaddy Voice with a new vendor and survey platform. This enhanced our data quality and reporting abilities, and we are thrilled to continue to deepen our understanding of our employees’ experiences.

Our GoDaddy Voice survey elicits an exceptionally high level of employee participation, and we believe it serves as proof that our employees know we listen to them and value their input. In 2022, 86% of our employees participated in GoDaddy Voice, revealing insights such as:

90% believe colleagues treat each other with respect.84% feel comfortable being themselves at work.

Learning and Development

Learning and development at GoDaddy centers on activating the exponential power of our people. In 2022, we launched a new career action planning template, held quarterly career workshops and started a career spotlight podcast series to showcase career stories of our own employees. We believe that people should never stop learning and expanding their potential, and we strive to create relevant and impactful learning experiences to help them develop their skills, enhance their knowledge and grow their careers.

Here are a few examples from 2022:

The Care and Services Learning Summit: A summit focused on global leadership, coaching and change management 
 GoDaddy Learning Days: Two full days of learning dedicated to professional development, inclusive engagement and GoDaddy’s business 
 LinkedIn Learning: A digital library offering more than 16,000 courses covering a wide range of technical, business, software and creative topics 
 Decision Lab: A decision-making simulation dedicated to fostering better and faster decision-making to drive better outcomes and contribute to our business goals 
 Elevate: A focused yearlong leadership training program that connects GoDaddy Guides 
in Care and Services with opportunities to develop operational excellence and build leadership skill sets

Leadership Training

Strong leadership means strong teams. We offer several pathways for leaders to develop their skills, including:

New Manager Onboarding: A required four- week course for new managers to introduce the high standards required for those in GoDaddy management positions and provide resources to help them succeed 
 Manager and Leadership Development: Ongoing support through a suite of courses covering topics such as leading virtually, leading through change, giving feedback, coaching and having difficult conversations 
 Lift Manager Development Program: A six-month program for Care and Services managers to enhance key leadership traits that enable leaders to achieve great results with their team

Performance Reviews

We value transparency in all areas of our business, and that extends to both feedback 
and introspection. Our performance review process includes formal midyear and year-end reviews. At these times, employees and managers discuss goal setting, career development, and performance insights and peer feedback.

Employees are also able to evaluate their own performance via self-evaluations. From our GoDaddy Voice survey, we found that:

77% of employees indicated that they had meaningful discussions with their managers about career development.83% of employees stated they received feedback that helps to improve their performance.

A critical aspect of our performance management approach includes company-wide processes that are intended to help reduce variance in performance assessments between groups with different genders, ethnicities, socioeconomic backgrounds, ages and so on. This involves ensuring that we assess both 
the work that people complete and how they complete it in alignment with our inclusive values. It also includes focusing on action and outcomes as opposed to style and personality, ensuring consistency in feedback and offering equal evaluation time.

EMPLOYEE EDUCATION BENEFITS 
The education and advancement of our employees is important to us. We support many of our employees by sponsoring their attendance at conferences and seminars, and we provide full-time employees with up to $5,000 per year (depending on geographic location) toward approved tuition costs through our education reimbursement program.

Benefits

Compensation at GoDaddy includes a range of thoughtfully curated benefits to attract and retain top talent and to support our human-centered approach. In 2022, we selected Lyra Health/ICAS as our new global employee assistance provider. Lyra Health/ICAS provides several confidential support options, including virtual and in-person therapy, coaching and unlimited access to self-care apps to help navigate difficult topics such as stress, anxiety, depression, substance use and relationship challenges.

Additional benefits in many of our locations include:

A first-class benefits package offering comprehensive medical, dental, vision and disability plans401(k) and IRA retirement plans, with generous employer matchingAn equity plan and employee stock purchase program to promote a sense of company ownership among our employeesProfessional development opportunities and tuition supportGlobal wellness days, dedicated days for employees to disconnect and prioritize wellbeingFamily benefits, such as a day care subsidy, paid parental leave, foster care assistance, adoption assistance and fertility coverageEmployee donation matching programs and paid time off for volunteer opportunities

A full list of employee benefits can be found on our Culture web page.

EMPLOYEE MATCHING AND PAID VOLUNTEER HOURS 
On a first-come, first-served basis, each GoDaddy employee can access up to $1,500 annually to match their donations to eligible nonprofit organizations 
and/or to reward eligible nonprofit organizations $35 per hour for every hour the employee volunteers with the organization. GoDaddy also provides employees with 20 hours of paid time off annually to volunteer — and through this program, we documented more than 4,500 volunteer hours in 2022 alone.

About This Report 
Unless otherwise noted, the GoDaddy 2022 Sustainability Report outlines our environmental, social and governance (ESG) strategies, activities, progress, metrics and performance for the fiscal year that ended on December 31, 2022. This report references the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards and includes select Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) Standards metrics for the Internet Media and Services sector.

GoDaddy is committed to regular, transparent communication about our sustainability progress, and to that end, we will share updates on an ongoing basis through our website and will continue to publish an annual Sustainability Report.

To learn more, please read our 2022 Sustainability Report.

Originally published in FedEx’s 2023 ESG Report

This year, FedEx celebrates its 50th year of operations—and 50 years of transforming the world by connecting people and possibilities.

I am proud to have been a part of this team for more than three decades and energized by our mission to move FedEx and the world from now to next. We have always been a company of action, and we remain committed to solving problems by finding solutions that go beyond business and benefit all humanity.

In the face of today’s pressing challenges, our purpose—to connect people and possibilities— matters more than ever. Whether collaborating to combat climate change, building teams that reflect the communities we serve, or ensuring integrity in all we do, we are innovating to deliver a more vibrant, inclusive, and sustainable future for all.

The success of our efforts is built on our sound environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices, which are aligned with our company strategic focus. We have reported on our environmental and social impact since 2009 and remain steadfast in transparently sharing our progress in three areas that are central to everything we do—our principles, our planet, and our people.

Our principles

We run our business with an absolute commitment to safety, ethics, integrity, and reliability in our global operations, as well as in how we manage supply chain relationships, advocacy, data, and cybersecurity practices. Guided by the FedEx Code of Conduct and reporting channels, we maintain a culture of accountability for team members, suppliers, and customers.

Our planet 

Our commitment to acting responsibly and resourcefully also drives our efforts to reduce our carbon footprint and build a more sustainable future. We are taking bold action to tackle climate change and invest in solutions to achieve our goal of carbon neutral operations globally by 2040. We have reduced our emissions intensity on a revenue basis by nearly 50% over the last 13 years, even as our average daily package volumes grew by 142%. We are determined to make even greater progress as evidenced by our ambitious goal.

Through our Reduce, Replace, Revolutionize strategy, our investments in three critical areas —vehicle electrification, sustainable energy, and carbon sequestration—have sparked exciting advancements. We continue to expand our zerotailpipe emissions fleet in the United States with the first-ever vehicles from General Motors’ BrightDrop, and we doubled the number of electric cargo bikes in use across Europe.

We are also harnessing the unmatched power of our data insights to increase sustainability throughout the value chain. FedEx® Sustainability Insights is a revolutionary new tool developed by FedEx Dataworks that enables customers to access near real-time emissions data. The tool is designed to provide new levels of transparency to our customers and create a feedback loop for making our own operations more efficient.

Our people

One of our biggest competitive advantages is our culture. Our team members around the world are committed to the Purple Promise: “I will make every FedEx experience outstanding.”

We are focused on making FedEx an outstanding place to work by fostering a diverse and inclusive team that reflects our operations globally. Our diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) commitments are aligned with our shared culture values and guided by the absolute belief that everyone deserves to be themselves and see themselves at FedEx. To highlight one example of this belief in action, FedEx team members who identify with a minority group held 36% of U.S. management roles in FY22.

Additionally, we continue to provide opportunities for all team members to advance in their careers at FedEx. More than 33,000 frontline team members are learning new skills through our Purple Pathways program, which won the American Transportation Association DEI Change Leader Award this year. And thousands of team members are earning certificates and degrees through tuition assistance and access to free online courses.

Our efforts to provide fulfilling employment and advancement opportunities, to build community and allyship through affinity groups and resource teams, and our relentless focus on safety and wellbeing has consistently earned FedEx recognition as one of the world’s best places to work.

Where now meets next 

This is a pivotal moment for FedEx. We have spent the last 50 years developing solutions that have made the world stronger, smarter, and better. We won’t stop now. As one FedEx, continuing to do our part to build a brighter, more inclusive world will be one of our most important deliveries yet.

Read more

Making corporate reports accessible for public analysis has long been at the heart of G&A’s mission. With a new announcement from the EU, more companies than ever may be sharing their sustainability disclosures in a centralized way.

This summer, it will be 16 years since a small team of us launched Governance & Accountability Institute as a new consultancy specializing in helping clients achieve leadership in corporate sustainability and sustainable investing. Carrying on some of the work of our former crisis management consultancy, we gathered and analyzed all types of corporate reports.

Our library room had shelves bulging with full-color annual reports and special reports on topics of interest to investors and other stakeholders. A small special section we began in the early 2000s slowly filled up with reports on corporate environmental performance. The earliest of these followed the initial guidelines (G1) of the then-new Global Reporting Initiative. In 2000-02 there were at most a few dozen such “GRI Reports.”

The pace rapidly picked up and by 2010 our team was gathering a dozen or two new “ESG” or “sustainability” or “responsibility” or “corporate citizenship” reports each week. We hunted them down and featured each week’s new reports in this newsletter. The job of gathering was not easy; many companies simply published their sustainability or CSR reports with little fanfare, not even a news release.

As our database of this new type of report grew, and we shared our analysis of them, GRI invited G&A Institute to be its data partner for the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland. We gathered the corporate reports published in these countries, conducted deep-dive analysis, databased the results, and shared top-line results publicly via GRI’s global database of reports. We did that for over ten years, until GRI ended its data partner program in 2020. Our internal work in gathering and analyzing corporate reports continues, however.

The universe of reports that we have gathered over the years – numbering in the thousands now – are important internal resources for the G&A team as we serve our corporate clients, especially in helping firms create their own award-winning sustainability reports that capture wide attention. We are still at it, gathering dozens of new reports every week and building superior corporate reporting and disclosure databases.

We were reminded of the absence of another central resource for corporate reports by the EU’s announcement last week that an agreement has been reached to establish an online European Single Access Point (ESAP) for all European corporate disclosures.

This is moving forward under a Capital Markets Union Action Plan to be agreed by the 27 member states of the EU, each of which has its own country-focused plan for managing reporting standards. The European corporate reports will be structured to respond to the forthcoming CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive), the SFDR (Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation), and the EU Taxonomy Regulation.

Attorney Jon McGowan, writing about the agreement in Forbes, explains that the ESAP will be rolled out in stages, as is happening with EU regulations for expanding corporate ESG/sustainability disclosure and reporting.

In the U.S., will the Securities and Exchange Commission develop a similar system to capture and share corporate sustainability disclosures? If the SEC releases its Final Rule on corporate disclosure of climate-related financial reporting, will it similarly require all reporters to provide their published results to a central database?

McGowan posits that while the SEC rule is expected to focus on disclosures related to the sustainability actions of a publicly-traded company, with the information designed to better inform investors, the European model for capturing and sharing corporate reports could lead the way to a user-friendly interface in the U.S. as well – helping companies to share their reports broadly to their stakeholder constituencies.

We’ll be watching the European ESAP rollout of ESAP in the coming months for signals of coming changes for U.S. companies as well.

This is just the introduction of G&A’s Sustainability Highlights newsletter this week. Click here to view the full issue.

Originally published in T-Mobile’s 2022 Corporate Responsibility Report

We started the “Un-carrier” movement 10 years ago to focus on the unmet needs of wireless customers and above all else, to never stand for “good enough,” an all-too-common approach among the “Carriers.”

A decade later, we’re still doing the right thing by offering real solutions that make a difference in our customers’ lives. And that turns out to be pretty good business. At T-Mobile we have a simple mission — to be the best in the world at connecting customers to their world. It inspires us to use our network, scale and resources to drive transformational improvements for our customers and employees, society and the planet.

Our extraordinary success in 2022 enabled us to invest back in T-Mobile customers with a strategy to deliver the best network, best value and best experiences. We also upheld our promises to connect more people, in more places, than ever before. For years, the other guys have overlooked and underserved America’s small towns and rural areas, but the Un-carrier is different. We believe reliable and affordable wireless and internet service is a necessity for ALL in today’s highly connected, digital world. When we deliver speed, choice and value to people and businesses across the country, we improve access to essential services, enable more efficient commerce, expand education and employment opportunities, and empower innovation.

That’s why we are so committed to Project 10Million, our $10.7 billion initiative to offer connectivity to up to 10 million eligible student households that lack equal access to the internet. We’ve made tremendous progress with Project 10Million and other education programs to help close the digital divide, connecting more than 5.3 million students and equipping them with free or highly subsidized service so they can have access where and when they need it. And, in partnership with Welcome.US, we pledged to provide up to 200,000 lines of service to Ukrainian and Afghan refugees entering the U.S. It’s difficult to imagine restarting a new life in a new country without the connectivity most of us take for granted.

As we build the nation’s largest, fastest and most-awarded 5G network, managing our environmental footprint is another top priority — something we know is important to our employees, customers and other stakeholders. Earlier this year, we announced an ambitious sustainability goal to achieve net-zero emissions across our ENTIRE carbon footprint by 2040. We set a high bar for ourselves, but tackling big problems with bold solutions is who we are — it’s in our DNA.

All of these efforts are made possible thanks to the amazing employees who bring T-Mobile’s welcoming, celebratory culture to life. They love our customers and champion diversity, equity and inclusion within our walls and out in the world. Together, we’re making progress on our five-year Equity in Action Plan, a set of 54 goals we created in 2020 to support genuine, positive experiences for everyone. We recognize that our company can’t be its best unless everyone can come to work as their authentic, best self.

2022 was an unforgettable year for T-Mobile, backed by our relentless passion for acting as a force for good, connecting people who need it most, and creating opportunity for all. It’s a new era of the Un-carrier, and as a T-Mobile team getting better and stronger each year, we’re committed to making an even bigger impact on the lives of our customers, our communities and the planet.

Learn more about our ESG approach and the progress we’ve made at www.t-mobile.com/responsibility/reporting.

by Paul Hilton, Trillium Asset Management

Trillium’s Sustainable Opportunities thematic suite of public equity strategies aims to address global sustainability challenges in three core areas: climate solutions, economic inclusion, and healthy living. Since 2008, Sustainable Opportunities has looked to identify companies benefiting from the shift to a more sustainable economy. As an intersecting theme, sustainable food and agriculture cuts across these issues, and yet it is a difficult theme to play in public equities.

The three general categories of sustainable food and agriculture investments in public markets include: 

• Agricultural and irrigation equipment,  
• Food production and distribution,  
• Food retailers, food service, and restaurants.

The planet needs more food, and more equitable food distribution, to meet the needs of a growing global population. A 2021 FAO study found that 690 million people globally are hungry, 9% of the world population. And yet we are faced with a scarcity of resources made more insecure based on the growing threats related to climate change, including extreme weather events, invasive pest spread, and plant migration. Agriculture and food production are a big part of the climate change problem, representing 19-29% of total greenhouse gas emissions.

Unfortunately, many large companies focused on agriculture in the public markets have been involved in factory farming, deforestation, prevalent use of pesticides, and excessive water consumption. Some have also been implicated in land grabs that have helped to push smaller farmers out of business.

Trillium began engaging companies on food more than 20 years ago, when it became the first investment firm to file a shareholder proposal on the issue of animal welfare. In 2002, Trillium also became the first sustainable investment firm to file a shareholder proposal on the issue of GMO labeling at Whole Foods Markets. More recently, we have engaged on issues including food waste, packaging, and climate targets.

Read Paul’s full article here – https://greenmoney.com/public-equity-investing-in-sustainable-food-and-agriculture

 

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