With employees and investors demanding greater sustainability, and governments legislating for it, organisations are now looking to develop a greener approach. But how are they going about it? And what behaviours make these businesses sustainable?

A new report commissioned by Moneypenny and WORKTECH Academy has identified four different types of sustainable organisation to help legal firms establish just how green they are, and what more they can do.

These different organisational typologies reflects a shift away from the office as the only place for work, the increasing employee consciousness around sustainability, and a growing consumer expectation for greener behaviours. For legal firms striving to improve their sustainable practices, we hope this report will help them categorise their own behaviours and provide food for thought about the wider sustainability improvements they can make.

Here are Moneypenny and WORKTECH Academy’s four green organisational typologies:

• Placemakers: Placemaking organisations really value sustainability, and its green appetite usually comes from strong leadership. These businesses often use their office building as the canvas on which to display their green credentials and aims. Consequently, they’re more likely to occupy green buildings, replete with smart building technologies, extensive recycling, and sustainability transport provision.
• Changemakers: This group, while still largely office-based, understands the value of influencing green behaviour through social support and peer-to-peer encouragement. These organisations empower employee-led initiatives in the workplace and will have ‘green champions’ to drive that change. In the context of the post-pandemic workplace, change-makers will use the ‘return to office’ as an opportunity to encourage employees to adopt more green behaviours.
• Choice-giver: Choice-givers are organisations that use new ways of working and flexible work policies to give employees the autonomy to work anywhere and make green choices for themselves and outside of the office – such as working from home to reduce their carbon footprint through reduced travel.
• Arbitrators: Arbitrators are the organisations extending sustainability beyond the office building, to the wider community on behalf of their workforce. These organisations understand that even if fewer people work from the office every day, they still have a degree of corporate responsibility for their employees – and are likely to offer subsidised transport and smart home energy solutions for employees as well as to run community-minded green initiatives.

Which typology is Moneypenny?

The report also looks at how Monepenny measures up against the four types, and has found it has traits of all them.

We’re a place maker because we built our HQ with environmental goals in mind  –  including features such as ground source heat pumps and rainwater recycling, but we’re also a changemaker because of our ‘ecopennies’ – an employee-led sustainable living group which not only shaped the design of our HQ, but has established initiatives such as car sharing and lowering the heating to reduce our carbon footprint.

Our business is also a choice-giver as we’ve invested in technology to make hybrid working work. One such innovation is our world-first integration with Microsoft Teams, which enables us to route calls through to employees wherever they are based and across multiple devices. Finally, we’re also an arbitrator as we engage with the wider community readily and choose to offset our UK carbon emissions with leading tree planting and carbon offsetting company Ecologi.

Sustainability is an important consideration for legal firms, and this report reflects our desire to engage with the market and build dialogue around its many facets.

To find out more about the four green typologies of the post-Covid workplace as well as the changing parameters of ESG responsibility and how Moneypenny outsourcing services can help shape sustainable change, download the Moneypenny and WORKTECH Academy report ‘From Place to People’, here.

Louise Wilson is head of finance sector at Moneypenny