What this post is about
- The relevance of a sustainability strategy
- Which aspects can be considered in the strategy
- What Zammad is already doing today: from green electricity to the global office
In times of climate change, rising energy and material costs, as well as a departure from the promise of infinite growth, companies are urged to be forward-looking and resource-conserving. To achieve this, it is important to take a long-term perspective that not only considers short-term investments but also keeps an eye on the long-term safeguarding of one's ability to act.
We have already shared with you here the great advantages of setting up your company on a sustainable basis. Now, however, we would like to turn our attention to the question of what can typically be included in a sustainability strategy - and how we at Zammad have positioned ourselves.
What Belongs Into A Sustainability Strategy?
Your sustainability strategy includes environmental, social, and economic areas of action. The most important areas of these are:
- Nature conservation
- Resource consumption
- recycling management
- Energy efficiency
- Behavioral change
- Social inclusion
However, you can only achieve improvements in all these aspects if they are centrally integrated into the overarching corporate strategy and are not an accessory of an individual team.
Therefore, first develop future-proof standards and then formulate measurable objectives to be able to check the effects of your strategy at any time!
1. Powered By "Green" Electricity
As a digital company with our own cloud offering, we make sure that all our services are powered by "green" electricity. In other words, generated from renewable energy sources such as the sun, wind, hydropower, or geothermal energy. This also applies to all providers and service providers with whom we cooperate for the provision of our offer.
2. Open Source Software Is The Future
A central aspect of our sustainability strategy is also to think about the meaningfulness and future viability of our products and further development. A very central component is our Open Source Commitment, to which we owe an annual growth of over 80%, for example.
By making the source code of our smart helpdesk Zammad publicly available and involving an entire developer community, we ensure a high-quality product that gets a little better every day through swarm intelligence. The best thing about it is that the production and maintenance costs for the software do not increase further if it is now used by ten, 100, or a million people.
You can read more articles about open source here on our blog.
3. Remote In The Global Office
At Zammad, we all work remotely, which means in home offices, coworking spaces, and distributed all over the world (but preferably in time zones that work well together) - from Germany to Portugal to Lithuania.
This corporate culture saves many dozens of kilometers of commuting every day for our team. In concrete terms, this means a saving of 142 grams of CO2 per kilometer (with an economical car). So with an average commute of 17 km and 250 working days a year, we save a whopping 132,770 kg of CO2 with 22 employees. Not bad, is it?
In addition, electricity, heating, as well as the transport of all kinds of office resources are simply eliminated with us.
If you would like to become a part of our team, then take a look at our job openings.
4. Central Location For Events
We have recently purchased two old buildings from the turn of the century around 1900. We are developing these as a meeting facility that can be used for many face-to-face team events - as well as for external teams who also work remotely first.
Instead of rebuilding these buildings from scratch (or even tearing them down and then rebuilding them), we are relying fully on recycling and upcycling. This way, the shell remains completely intact and all kinds of resources are reused. By way of comparison, new buildings only pay off in terms of their carbon footprint after 70 years. We can do better than that.
5. Personal Measures
Our founder and CEO Martin Edenhofer privately purchased a 300-hectare forest. The goal here is to preserve this area in the long term as an unsealed recreational area and to leave nature untouched. This investment as a private effort has nothing directly to do with Zammad but shows that Martin Edenhofer deeply cares.
„This is my very personal contribution to a sustainable future.“ sais Martin.
We have aspirations to continue to expand our climate commitment as Zammad in the future and to serve as a good example.
Summary
At Zammad, we take sustainability seriously because there is no alternative to preserving the Earth as a livable place and provider of all our resources. With a sustainability strategy in place, you are also setting sail for your organization's future in 2023. Start with an analysis of your processes and consider where sustainable restructuring is necessary and makes sense. In this way, you will take the transformation into your own hands!