Lucy Piper, WorkforClimate

Apr 17

Today's guest is Lucy Piper, Director at WorkForClimate.

WorkForClimate is a not-for-profit that provides individual employees with clear step-by-step playbooks to help influence and accelerate a company's decarbonization initiatives. Lucy and Cody discuss how climate change can be an intimidating topic and pushing for change inside your company can be risky. And yet it's clear that if the world's corporations don't change quickly to reduce emissions, the effects will be worse.

So how do we quickly help employees feel educated and empowered to push for change? WorkForClimate solution comes from its playbooks and programs. They've identified four key areas of change that employees can impact: energy, emissions, money, and influence. Lucy and Cody chat about each of these, why they matter, and some of the steps that WorkForClimate recommends employees take to maximize their collective influence. And one thing that isn’t covered, but nonetheless important is that when we take personal agency around climate change, it inspires more people to do the same, encouraging more and more. As organizations realize that these well-informed asks aren't coming from some radical minority, but rather from a significant amount of their employee base, that's ultimately what drives change.

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Cody Simms
Lucy Piper / WorkforClimate
MCJ Podcast /Collective

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Episode recorded on March 22, 2023.

In this episode, we cover:

[4:22] Lucy's climate journey
[7:39] Employees as influential stakeholders to drive climate initiatives within corporations
[12:45] The power of strength in numbers despite risks
[14:44] An overview of green teams
[15:57] How formally organized groups and sustainability professionals factor into WorkforClimate's playbook
[18:00] The areas WorkforClimate focuses on, including energy, emissions, money, and advocacy
[23:04] The issue of greenwashing
[25:46] An overview of WorkforClimate's playbooks
[29:12] Pros and cons employees have to grapple with to inspire corporate action
[33:00] WorkforClimate's emissions framework
[40:05] The type of companies best suited to collaborate with WorkforClimate
[47:15] The money category WorkforClimate addresses, including bank accounts, treasury, and retirement funds
[54:28] The role of corporate influence on policy

Cody Simms (00:00):
Today's guest on my Climate Journey is Lucy Piper, director at WorkForClimate. WorkForClimate is a not-for-profit that provides individual employees inside companies with clear step-by-step playbooks to help influence and accelerate a company's decarbonization initiatives. Lucy and I talk about how climate change can be an intimidating topic and pushing for change inside your company can be risky. And yet it's clear that if the world's corporations don't change quickly to reduce emissions, then the effects of the resultant climate change will be worse.
(00:37):
So how do we quickly help employees feel educated and empowered to push for change? WorkForClimate Solutions is via their playbooks and programs. They've identified four key areas of change that employees can push for energy, emissions, money and influence. Lucy and I chat about each of these and talk about why they matter and some of the steps that WorkForClimate recommends employees to take to maximize their own collective influence. And one thing that we didn't touch on, but which also matters is that when any of us take personal agency around climate change, it inspires more people to do the same, which inspires more to do the same and more. And as organizations realize that these well-informed asks aren't coming from some radical minority, but rather from a significant amount of their employee base, well that's ultimately what drives change. Before we dive in, I'm Cody Sims.
Yin Lu (01:40):
I'm Yin Lu.
Jason Jacobs (01:41):
And I'm Jason Jacobs. And welcome to My Climate Journey.
Yin Lu (01:47):
This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms (01:53):
In this podcast, we traverse disciplines, industries, and opinions to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all the ways people like you and I can help. Lucy, welcome to the show.
Lucy Piper (02:08):
Hi, Cody. Thank you so much for having me.
Cody Simms (02:11):
So as I understand it, at WorkForClimate your mission is to help individuals bring climate action into the workplace. Is that the right way to think about the impact that you're trying to have?
Lucy Piper (02:24):
You're exactly right Cody. WorkForClimate is designed to help individuals connect their action to systems change by going into their workplaces and advocating for more ambitious action on climate from the corporation that they work for. So pretty much summarized it perfectly.
Cody Simms (02:45):
Got it. So there's the notion that we as employees of a big company could get together and encourage ourselves to do more. We could say, "Hey, let's all do a meatless Monday or," this, that and the other, which is sort of an employee led cultural shift. But this WorkForClimate is really about how do we actually hold the organization at the top, the highest of levels accountable to pushing for change, whether that's change on power consumption, change on emissions, change on the financial makeup of the company, et cetera. Am I understanding that correctly?
Lucy Piper (03:19):
Exactly. Three things. Basically, corporations are key to solving the climate crisis. They have the power to rapidly reduce emissions. They can mobilize significant resources really fast, and they also define the political space for climate policy around the world. And so inside corporations, employees are really powerful stakeholders inside of businesses and they can lead climate initiatives and innovation from the inside. So we're seeing more and more over the past three to five years employees taking action on things that align with their values and that they care deeply about. And so WorkForClimate was created in an effort to kind of harness that power of employees and really bridge the gap between the climate movement and the corporate sector and just harness people's passion and their deep grief about what they're seeing unfold with the climate crisis. Yeah, that's the high level summary, I guess.
Cody Simms (04:22):
And how did you get involved, Lucy? We were chatting a little bit before the show and you mentioned like me, you're relatively new to this climate space. This isn't an area you spent your entire academic career sort of studying and preparing yourself for what, what's been your path?
Lucy Piper (04:40):
Yeah, similar to yourself. I'm super new to the climate movement. It's been about two and a half, three years since I joined the WorkForClimate team. Prior to that, I spent my career working in brand and advertising bit of film production in my early career, but I have no academic or professional background in the climate movement. And I'm not sure how you felt when you first started talking to people in the climate movement, but I found it really intimidating. There are so many super smart, brilliant academics working on the causes of climate change and the solutions to climate change. And I think that is a... What's the word? It puts people off from engaging. It's so intimidating. And so yeah, my background was not in climate change at all. I worked inside of companies and I guess that's what attracted me to doing this work at WorkForClimate.
(05:43):
I kind of saw this program that was being built and it was about finding people who are professionals who kind of understand how change happens inside of businesses and have an understanding of their own influence and how to work with decision makers to get them to support a business case, for example. But yeah, my background isn't in climate. I went to law school for a short time and quickly realized that wasn't for me. And then I did a film degree, which was the best time of my life. But looking back with hindsight, probably should have finished the law degree. It would've been very helpful in the work that I'm doing now. Yeah, like bummed around for a few years living in the French Alps, running ski chalets, and back then, that was from about 2005 for a few years starting to notice the ski seasons were really patchy.
(06:41):
And even back then we were talking about climate maybe not so much in the terms of climate change in the way that we talk about it nowadays, but back then it came onto my radar very early on after graduating university. And so it planted a seed and it's always been a subject that I was really passionate about, but it wasn't something that I necessarily felt like I had the power or the expertise to be able to affect change. And so it wasn't until I became a lot older that I realized you don't have to be a scientist or an academic or a policymaker to be someone who is creating positive change. You can be an everyday individual like me and still influence decision makers. I went around the houses there, but hopefully that gives you a little bit of context about why I'm here.
Cody Simms (07:39):
Yeah, really helpful. And look, we're going to dive all into the different resources that WorkForClimate provides to employees and how it helps individuals to go push for that change. But I want to start by talking a little bit about how someone creates change in a large company regardless of whether it's for climate. If you're inside a company and you believe the company should be changing its product lines or you believe the company should be changing its parental leave policies or you believe the company should be changing its go to market strategy, what kind of person is good at driving change and what have you seen about what makes an internal change agent in a company work?
Lucy Piper (08:29):
If you're considering a bunch of different stuff that isn't climate change, I reckon there's a particular type of change maker, a particular type of person who's generally confident driven, just potentially more extroverted type of people who are driving change in companies if they want to see a change in policy around employment benefits and that kind of thing, it's generally a fairly privileged thing to be able to back yourself and put together business cases and mingle with decision makers or do a bit of that internal power mapping to push for change. But what we are seeing with climate change is that it is bringing more and more people into this movement of driving change. And we see a lot of different types of people who would not necessarily fit that mold that you would think of as someone inside a company driving change. And we try to help every different type of person to get up these initiatives internally.
(09:37):
And the way that we do that is by number one, and you guys would know this at my climate journey, finding your people, finding your community is key to feeling confident, feeling safe, building momentum when you're driving especially difficult initiatives, it can feel very difficult and lonely. So the first step that we encourage people to do is find people inside of your company that feel the same way as you do about the climate crisis and get together with them and start to catch up and socialize some of the ideas that you want to pursue inside of your company. And then we give them some practical frameworks and steps and playbooks to be able to follow that, help them figure out, "Okay, what is the most feasible thing that we could ask the company to commit to right now that would get us progression and get us runs on the board," figure out what that goal is, get your people together, start building a business case of sorts, and then do a bit of a map of who are the key decision makers that could impact the change that we are trying to drive.
(10:58):
And look around those decision makers. Who are the influencers that you can reach out to inside your company and stop building those alliances? It's kind of 101. And before I joined WorkForClimate, I was doing a lot of this stuff instinctively inside of a business trying to further our efforts on gender equality and diversity. And I didn't realize because I'd never been part of an NGO or a movement or working with Campaigners, I didn't realize that this was basic 101 of driving change. And so we are trying to take the basic 101 of driving change and codify it and distribute it to employees all around the world.
Cody Simms (11:46):
Such a good acknowledgement. I think first of all, that typically you think of a change agent as someone who does have a seat of privilege because they're pushing controversial topics potentially and potentially are putting their livelihood at risk in order to push for a greater good. And not everyone necessarily feels comfortable that they can do that, but I think crucially, secondly, I'm hearing from you a message that when it comes to climate change, because it affects everyone, the one kind of secret weapon that organizers inside a company can have is this notion of building this feeling that hey, there are more of us, there are more of us who care about this issue than there are who don't. And we can build that internal tidal wave and build that strength in numbers to help leadership see that there is change that the entire employee base is looking for.
Lucy Piper (12:45):
Totally. And I reckon we're at such an interesting moment in time right now because that tension between finding the courage to speak out inside your company when there is an environment of massive job losses, particularly what we're seeing in the tech industry right now and whether or not there'll be further contagion of that into other industries, there is increasing fear around your security and your job. But then we are talking on the day after the release of the IPCC, the final report of 2023. And so that is this increasing reiteration of the urgency that we're facing with climate change right now. And we are still hearing from employees who want to keep pushing on, even in the face of maybe I will lose my job. And my colleague has been talking to some of the, what you call it, a green team, maybe it's a green team inside of one of the big tech companies.
(14:00):
And there have recently been a number of them who were laid off in the past month and there are also some of the green team still inside that company and they feel like, "Oh, is taking this action is speaking up, is that going to put me more in the firing line when they're going through that list of making cuts?" But they are still prepared to pursue action at work despite that risk. But yeah, that's a privileged position to be in, certainly when you're in a company and you kind of know that you can step up and take a risk.
Cody Simms (14:44):
You actually are kind of hit the next topic I wanted to talk about, which is this notion of green teams. Maybe define what a green team is for folks who haven't heard that phrase for us? And then how much does this notion of a bit more sort of formally organized group of people that actually create this name and identity for themselves of being a green team, how much does that factor into the WorkForClimate playbook and ethos?
Lucy Piper (15:15):
Yeah, so green teams in my experience and from what I've seen are these groups of people that come together. They self-identify as, yeah, we really give a damn about climate. We want to take action at work, or we want to see our company doing more stuff to support climate action and they're self organizing and they're extremely motivated, they're extremely passionate. And quite often we have green teams or representative of a green team reaching out to us. And generally they don't have technical backgrounds in sustainability. So they are the group of people who would identify as non-sustainability professionals. So our audience is grouped into two separate areas. One is those non-sustainability professionals, people who potentially know how to drive change in a company or they're very skilled at leading initiatives or running projects or driving changes, but they are baffled when it comes to decarbonization. Then on the other hand, you have sustainability professionals who often have a mandate from their company to be driving change, but they don't necessarily have the resources in order to deliver that change.
(16:32):
And they quite often come from by the nature of the job, those very technical backgrounds where they are not experienced at engaging and mobilizing the entire workforce to get behind initiatives. So we try and help those groups of people with more of the changemaker stuff, and what we try and do is help the green teams with frameworks for change. These are the things that companies need to do in order to drive change, and we give those to those people off you go. Then with the sustainability professionals, they know what needs to be done, but they need to get it ramped up. So we help them scale up their influence, their leverage, and like I said, engage and mobilize more of the workforce. What we are finding with green teams is that the framework that we use, it's kind of like a decarbonization framework and it's a derivative of Project Drawdown's employee handbook, the guide for corporations.
(17:39):
So we refer to our workers Drawdown aligned, and we've partnered with the team at Project Drawdown a few times because they are incredible. And the research that has gone into developing this book of this is what it looks like for a company to go all in on solving the climate crisis. So we take their methodology and we've distilled it down to the most urgent things that need to happen in order to decarbonize a business, and that's grouped into four areas which are renewable energy. So getting your company to switch to 100% renewable energy as fast as possible. And that's quite often the most feasible, easiest goal for people to work on initially because it's simple compared to some of the other changes that we are encouraging companies to follow. So we've got renewable energy. Then the second part is rapid decarbonization. So committing to a science-based target, getting a science-based target approved for your net zero plans.
(18:50):
So not some way distant net zero goal that is relying entirely on bullshit offsets to be able to reach that number like a science-based target or a target that is in line with the science. It doesn't have to be a official science based target. So that is your scope one, two, and three emissions reduction pathway. And we help employees to push for immediate action. So not just getting your company to commit to something for 2050 or 2030, we coach them through, okay, how is our company going to reduce emissions year on year by 7% at least starting tomorrow? What does that look like through every single department and function in your company? So we've got renewable energy, rapid emissions reduction, then we have money. So financed emissions and looking at where your corporate cash is invested, where your employer retirement funds, your 401(k)s, your 403(b)s or if you're in Australia, I am your superannuation, where are those big pools of money invested?
(20:05):
Are you investing in fossil fuel expansion? That is what we need to stop immediately. So the money area of a company's emissions, finance emissions is the next thing that we get employees to explore. And then lastly, but I would argue most importantly is lobbying and advocacy. There are some very bad actors in preventing climate solutions from happening. Obviously we know that we have the fossil fuel companies who are just not moving at all, let alone fast enough. But then we also have the entire corporate sector, which is pretty much much being a bystander at the moment. And what we need from the corporate sector is lobbying and advocacy so that governments are regulating, are creating policy that is going to create the environment that we need in order to solve the situation. So we work with our partners at Climate Voice who are amazing advocates for employees to pressure their companies to be lobbying for climate. So we-
Cody Simms (21:19):
Bill's been a guest on the pod before Bill Weihl. Yeah.
Lucy Piper (21:20):
He's an incredible man and we are extremely supportive of the work that Climate Voice are doing. And we almost off-ramp in each of those four areas, that framework, there's almost like another organization that we then will off-ramp companies to. So that is the expert that they start speaking to and Climate Voice is that example with lobbying.
Cody Simms (21:43):
Great. So I'm hearing taking in all that you were saying, an organization will have this green team which are dedicated potentially non-sustainability trained employees then will have a sustainability team that has technical experts in the work and a company may or may not already have the policies in place that they want to pursue. If they have a sustainability team, presumably they are working on them. So the green team may be in the role of influencing the company to take action in the first place, or it may be in the role of influencing accountability of existing declarations that the company has made and trying to map and marry sort of long term goals with real term operating realities.
(22:30):
In that you are creating these four playbooks, one around energy, one around emissions, one around money, and one around influence to help these employees map who they need to talk to in the organization, build the stories that they want these companies to actually go after not just the stories but the realities and then push for direct change in each of these areas. Am I hearing correctly the high level view of the situation at hand today and how WorkForClimate fits into that?
Lucy Piper (23:04):
Yes, Cody, I think you've got it bang on. I would take it a step further and say what the playbooks and the content and the courses that we create are intended to do is almost inoculate staff against corporate greenwash. There's so much stuff in place inside businesses right now, and you say sustainability teams might be working on these goals, et cetera, et cetera, but there is only one metric that matters and that metric is carbon emissions and it's going up year on year on year.
(23:37):
So whatever companies are saying they're doing, it's not working and we need to change that. And I think that greenwash is a massive risk in the corporate sector right now, and I believe that employees have no idea how bad this is and that lots of people believe their companies are doing the right thing. They believe that, oh, we have this target or we're doing this thing and therefore we are contributing to change, but it's not doing anything. So we are trying to give employees the information and also give them the steps towards taking action. And I describe it as an in inoculation against greenwash because what we want to do is have these people on the inside of big institutions that can see when there's a company policy that comes out, they can really interrogate that from a position of knowledge and say, "Hmm, that's not going to add up. That's not really going to drive much change inside of our company."
Cody Simms (24:47):
Yeah. So let's dive into some of those examples because you know mentioned one of the challenges here is that this content can be technical and it can be difficult and can be intimidating. So let's start with energy. You said that's the playbook that is the easiest on-ramp for companies. I think of energy as really complicated and challenging when you're first getting started in this space. So interesting that you've identified that as the easiest on-ramp for employees to drive action. So I downloaded your playbook before the recording and you've broken it out into multiple steps. How do you get smart? How do you get help? How do you build your plan? How do you make your case? How do you execute your plan? And then ultimately how do you continue to communicate the wins internally to the rest of the company and externally presumably? Why don't you walk us through one of these playbooks? What does it feel like to be an employee who has decided to get involved and comes to WorkForClimate and says, okay, I'm going to try to change how our company procures energy.
Lucy Piper (25:53):
I'm not going to lie. It's very challenging for the employees that are doing this and the way that those playbooks are actually written because same as you. I knew nothing about renewable energy procurement two and a half years ago, absolutely nothing.
Cody Simms (26:09):
Yeah, I mean you power purchase agreements and RECs and this, that and the other, it starts to make your head spin when you're first getting into the space, right?
Lucy Piper (26:18):
Totally. But what I can tell you is the way that we write our playbooks and the way that we develop our course curriculums is we go out and we find the companies and we find the people inside companies that have successfully been a part of making this change. We interview them. So we interview dozens and dozens of people who have been through this and we take that information and we try to consolidate it and translate it into understandable language and concepts so that you don't have to be a procurement professional to understand the high level basics. We're not trying to make everyone an expert in renewable energy, but we want people to understand what needs to happen in order for their company to buy their energy from a renewable source and at a conceptual level that is not that difficult to understand.
(27:22):
And there you can break it down into different pathways and then you help those employees get an understanding of which pathway is going to be appropriate for their company. Is it a power purchase agreement or is it buying renewable energy certificates from an energy provider? There's obviously complexities as you go down the different pathways, but what we do is we set them off and say, "Okay, these are the next people that you need to speak to. Here's some resources to have a look at." And we just get them curious and interested in this concept and get them talking to the people inside their company that are procuring energy or dealing with supply chain, that kind of thing.
Yin Lu (28:11):
Hey everyone, I'm Yin a partner at MCJ Collective here to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ membership community, which was born out of a collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning. And doing that goes beyond just listening to the podcast. We started in 2019 and have grown to thousands of members globally each week. We're inspired by people who join with different backgrounds and points of view. What we all share is a deep curiosity to learn and a bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change.
(28:38):
Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community, a number of founding teams have met, several nonprofits have been established and a bunch of hiring has been done. Many early stage investments have been made as well as ongoing events and programming like monthly women in climate meetups, idea jam sessions for early stage founders, climate book club workshops and more. Whether you've been in the climate space for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important. If you want to learn more, head over to MCJCollective.com and click on the members tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show.
Cody Simms (29:12):
So for our listeners some of whom are quite experienced in this area, as an example, if you are trying to help your company think through or you are trying to make a recommendation to your leadership at your company on whether they should be going direct to a renewable energy retailer or they should be negotiating a power purchase agreement or they should be buying their own solar panels for the company, what are some of the pros and cons that you're seeing teams have to grapple with in each of these areas that they have to get smart around in order to recognize what the company should be doing?
Lucy Piper (29:48):
One recent example is a corporate workshop that we were doing with a really big health insurance company here in Australia and we had been approached by their green team, they didn't have a sustainability department but by their green team who want their company to be doing more on climate and we'd given them our playbooks and a bunch of the tools and then we were invited in to help them map out, "Okay, what are we doing? What are the next steps?" And with renewable energy, we talked through some of the options for them and one thing that came up, which comes up from a lot of people that we speak to inside companies is the property that they're in. We were talking about solar panels for example, as one element of their renewable energy plan, if you like, putting solar panels on the roof of their assets.
(30:40):
Now that is a win-win for everyone, like it's a win for the company, it's a win for the asset owner, the asset being the property, the real estate owners. But the challenge is when a building has multiple tenants inside of it, so there's a bunch of different companies all renting in the same property. Maybe they all want solar panels on the roof, but none of them are speaking to each other. They think it's a perceived problem. "We perceive this to be really hard because how will we get all of the other companies on board with this change?"
(31:16):
Well, guess what? That's basic organizing. It's that 101 that we talked about at the beginning. So we get those employees or we get representatives within one company talking to another company and you get them all together and they go to the landlord of the property and they put together a plan. So we've seen some enormous success from that inside of companies. Yeah, like I say, we were just in this company and they had this perception that it would be impossible, but because we've talked to so many people that have done it before, you can make them feel confident that it's an achievable change.
Cody Simms (31:57):
Great. I love the example that that's super helpful. Well, and let's move on to the next one, which you said maybe influence is the most impactful, but I think you said emissions might be the meatiest, right? Because this is directly how are we setting a plan today to reduce the emissions of our company starting this year? One of the things I enjoyed in the playbook on your website for emissions was this mindset shift of going from we are carbon neutral as a company, which you talked about as being a sort of compensation oriented mind frame to one where you are saying "We are contributing to a global carbon neutral economy," which is one of the company actually contributing to the broader goals. Walk through the overall emissions framework that you all recommend and hitting on that mind frame shift a little bit, but also sort of what does the scope of thinking about reducing your company's emissions even look like from an employee based perspective?
Lucy Piper (33:00):
Such a great question and that is perhaps the hardest part of what we are doing. We are not carbon consultants or carbon accountants. We are not trying to replace that role as well. There is a critical role for experts, consulting firms, internal carbon management that is critical to this change. So that is not where we are operating from, definitely not our area of expertise, but what we do do is help employees and the teams that they bring together help them to do a sketch of their carbon footprint and figure out where the biggest sources of emissions are, but also where the immediate priorities should be, where they can make an impact. And for example, we've been working with a green team and they didn't really know where their biggest source of emissions were going to be, weren't in manufacturing, they don't sell a product. And we helped them to map that their biggest source of emissions is their finance emissions.
(34:20):
And that was a really big deal for them as an outsider going in who's working in this space. We knew going into it that that's where their biggest opportunity for impact was, but the employees had no idea. So anyway, we helped them to develop the next steps for their finance emissions. But for a company that has really large scope one, scope two emissions, what we would try to do is get them in a place where engaging with a consulting firm, they're almost like one step ahead or a consulting firm can come in and really hit the ground running because the company is already interrogating where they can start to make changes. But making those changes is very difficult and inertia and the status quo are the biggest things that we've, we've got to get through. And what we really want to do is kind of build a green collar workforce, so educate as many employees as we can to get this climate first mindset.
(35:30):
And the analogy that I think of is when we went through the digital transformation, and you hear lots of people talk about this, companies we've been through transformation many times before and now we've got to go through a climate transformation or a carbon transformation. It's like the digital transformation. And I remember being told years ago, you have to have a digital first mindset. And at the time people being like, what does that mean? And heaps was invested in educating employees around digital transformation. Well now we have to educate employees around climate transformation. So we are trying to educate people to give them this climate first mindset so that they can figure out how to solve these problems. A consulting firm cannot get figure out for a company the fastest way to reduce their emissions. We as WorkForClimate cannot help a company figure out the fastest way to reduce their emissions.
(36:32):
But the people who can are the people inside of a business who know the product, who know how everything works and have the smarts to think through, okay, how are we going to flip this on its head? How are we going to transform everything? But right now people aren't thinking about it. They think it's someone else's job or they think that they can't do it or that they're going to be told how to do it, but no one's coming to save us. And we believe that professionals can, if they've got the information, they are going to be able to work on solving this problem and that will help accelerate progress.
Cody Simms (37:08):
The digital transformation is such an interesting metaphor that I tend to use as well, only because I lived it in my lifetime. I saw that companies shift to being digital first and organizationally, you had upstart companies that were digital first. Mostly the tech startups, the Googles, the Facebooks, the Yahoos back in the day that were sort of driving digital change, but they weren't in industry. They were these tech companies on the side.
(37:38):
And in industry people started to see that and they would hire maybe a chief digital officer or a chief innovation officer who would ultimately try to create culture, but culture has to happen organically. And some companies hired the right people, brought the right people into roles, brought digital natives into these companies, and did ultimately shift the company into a digital first future. And some companies just died. They didn't make that jump. And I feel like with sustain climate, it's going to be so interesting to see how that change happens because it's a little bit different. A company needs to reduce its emissions, but some companies, the product that they make is of high emissions. How do they change themselves? Such a challenge.
Lucy Piper (38:26):
Yeah, that's an impossible one to solve, isn't it really? And I think if a company company's product is a direct source of emissions, there's a problem there and I'm not sure WorkForClimate or employees are going to be able to transform that company. And that's when a business model needs to be examined, right? Yeah. What are you-
Cody Simms (38:50):
That's right.
Lucy Piper (38:53):
Who are you becoming as a business? And if you are not here to help society live well, be well what are you doing? Especially if it's a newer company, what are you doing starting a business in the 2020s that is contributing to direct emissions?
Cody Simms (39:18):
Yeah. Yeah that sounds like your sweet spot then is really companies that emissions are a byproduct of what they do, but it's not, their core product isn't necessarily a heavily emittive company, and so you're helping the company fine tune itself and make the right choices going forward to set itself up for future success. That to me is what I'm hearing when it comes to how do we reduce emissions? You're not going to walk into an oil and gas company and say, "How are you reducing your emissions today?" That's going to be a tall order. Ultimately, they need to completely change their business models, but you can help a company that is building a consumer clothing line to think about how they're doing things the correct way or a software company to think about how they're doing things the correct way. Am I hearing you correctly, Lucy?
Lucy Piper (40:05):
Yeah, totally. So WorkForClimate is a part of the climate movement, so we don't exist on our own and we're an NGO O backed startup, if you like. So we are part of a bigger organization called the Sunrise Project, and the Sunrise Project works on campaigns around the world to essentially cut off the finance to the expansion of the fossil fuel industry. And so WorkForClimate is a program that was set up designed to build power with employees, but within a really specific group of companies. So like you say, we are not going to get fossil fuel companies to reduce their emissions by getting their employees to push for change internally. Also, there's a lot of companies that are doing some really great stuff already who are leaders in this space. If you look at companies like [inaudible 00:41:04] or Microsoft, there's some companies that are doing great stuff in this space.
(41:08):
We want to look at those companies in the middle who are sitting on the fence. They're not necessarily laggards, but they have so much power in shaping policy globally and in influencing fossil fuel companies and where their corporate cash investments are and that kind of thing. So we are very specific in our approach to who we are are trying to reach inside of companies. And a really interesting thing is starting to happen. So we were born out of the climate movement and we've developed these educational programs for employees that teach them about driving change on climate inside of companies. And we thought that we're going in with this agenda, if you like almost, and I talk about inoculating against greenwash, but a really strange thing is happening, which is companies are now coming to us and saying, "Can we use your tools for our employees? Our employees are asking us to engage them on climate. Can we use your tools? Can you run your courses inside of our companies?"
(42:21):
And that is a win-win. It's unbelievable. But it feels like we are bridging the climate movement and the corporate sector in a way that is the best for both worlds because the climate movement is trying its damnedest to get companies doing more. And companies are starting to realize that if they don't move on this, they are going to be in big trouble. All of the transitional risk and the physical risk of climate change is now knocking on their doors and they don't know what to do. And executive leaders are... Like, it's coming through in surveys and in research from Deloitte and KPMG that leaders don't know how to solve this problem. They're saying that they don't have the internal skills and capabilities. So here we are in the middle of the movement and the corporate sector saying, "Well, we are creating these tools that put it into the hands of your employees so that they can solve your problems for you." But the byproduct is it's helping to push the movement agenda of getting companies to move faster. So it's a really exciting place to be in.
Cody Simms (43:37):
Amazing. And I noticed in the playbook, one of the things that you recommend, particularly for helping employees understand the emissions levers in the company, one of the specific tactics you recommend, which I thought was awesome, was for the employees to send an employee survey out to the other employees of what are the parts of the company that you work in where you believe there are heavy emissions that could be abated in some way. I'm sure you wouldn't use that sort of technical, semi-technical language, but ways to just reach out to your fellow coworkers informally to gather data and opinions from them as sort of an early step in organizing, which I thought was, it is kind of obvious in retrospect, but just having a playbook with these tools in front of you creates a roadmap that people can work off of.
Lucy Piper (44:26):
Yeah. And that I'm laughing because that example came, we didn't think of that, that came from one of the WorkForClimate community members. And it was so impactful that we then wrote it into the playbook and it's a part of all of our courses, something that we try and encourage people to do. We had one of the alumni of our very early programs, he was trying to push for renewable energy inside of a somewhat conservative organization. He was an engineer of a medium sized firm of engineers. And in one of our program sessions, we had a speaker from Unilever, potentially like an organization that's doing good stuff, trying their hardest to do good stuff. So we had a speaker and she talked about how she'd done a staff survey and she used the responses to then feed that data back to leadership. And so David, who was in our course at the time, a little light bulb went off for him and he went away very quietly and pulled together a Survey Monkey staff survey, and he sent it out to everyone in the company and he built it.
(45:44):
He constructed it in a way that he knew the case that he wanted to build. So he asked the questions to get the answers that he needed in order to build this case for renewable energy and building out solar. And he got enormous responses from the staff and the engineers in his firm built it into his business case, took it to leadership and basically said, "Look, your employees want it, your customers want it and it's the right thing to do, and here's the data from your own employees to back it up." And it's a really powerful but simple idea.
Cody Simms (46:22):
Yeah. And you can imagine applying it to other aspects of the company. Does your office location still use plastic water bottles or do you have a filtered water available to you? What are your travel policies in your location and how frequently are you getting on an airplane? Just little questions like that that can help you amass really powerful data, I would think. What's the average distance you're commuting to work every day, and how often are you in the office versus work from home? Little things like that, that all really do make a difference, I would think.
Lucy Piper (46:54):
Yeah, I reckon when you've got the data, then you can use that to build a story. And so much of what we are trying to do is leaning on that storytelling and narrative framing part of creating change in a company. And so if you've got data, it's very helpful, particularly when it's around your own employees.
Cody Simms (47:15):
All right. Well let's hit the other two categories that you mentioned because I don't want to leave them out, which is money and influence. Those two go together like peanut butter and jelly, don't they? And so for money, this is all about how do you help your company make sure that it's not investing its dollars into a future that you don't want? So this is, I assume, has to do a lot with its own bank accounts and treasury, but also what it's offering to its employees in terms of retirement packages and the like. Is that correct?
Lucy Piper (47:49):
Yeah, correct. And the easiest way into that money part of this for employees is employee retirement funds because that is a big chunk of money. And in the US most employers do not offer a climate safe retirement fund, which is unbelievable to me because freedom of choice seems to underpin so much of US society that I find it shocking that you don't have freedom of choice around where your own retirement fund is invested. And so what we try to do is get employees to build a basic business case around climate safe retirement and then find the people inside their company that are managing that. It's complicated. It's all the system is designed to make it impossible to create change because obviously your company will hold your 401(k) or 403(b) with an asset manager. So what we're trying to do is get the company to engage with your asset manager, whether that's BlackRock or Vanguard or some other, and pressure them for climate safe retirement options. But it's challenging. It's a challenging environment with ESG investing and all of the associations right now in the US with that.
Cody Simms (49:21):
Great. And let's go right into influence then for those who want to dive in more deeply there. We obviously have, as I mentioned, it's maybe a couple years old now, but we did have Bill Weihl from Climate Voice on the pod who does talk about how you can help your company to lobby more effectively for climate. The way I see this one is in reality, I work day in day out in climate tech and we're trying to help support entrepreneurs building new innovations to help us with climate change. One could argue a lot of the tech that needs to happen does exist today. There's a lot still that needs to get built, but there's a lot that exists today that's blocked because of policies and regulations. And so how do you help your company not put people into office that are going to block a climate change agenda in terms of policy? How does that work? When I worked at bigger companies, I had no idea who my company was contributing campaign dollars toward. How does that even work inside a big company?
Lucy Piper (50:35):
It's like the dark arts, Cody. It is something that most people inside an organization have no idea about, and I had absolutely no idea before talking to Bill and learning from him, and also from our friends and partners at Influence Map in the UK who do a lot of research work around lobbying and the dollars that corporations are spending. And it's so hard because it's a part of a business where unless you are in say, a corporate affairs team, it's not something that you are ever, ever going to have exposure to. But what we've tried to do with our playbooks and what we tried to teach is how you can engage with your company on issues where lobbying is going to have an impact. For example, in Australia right now, we have had a policy go through Parliament, which is called the safeguard mechanism. And without going into too much boring detail, it's about how we can practically start capping the emissions from really heavy emitters in the industrial sector.
(51:47):
And what we are trying to do is get employees of companies who are not heavy emitters, like Google for example, to lobby the government to get the policy to be way more progressive because it's turning into this massive greenwashing piece of policy that is allowing offsetting. And we went into Google and spoke to some employees there, and some of the people high up at Google said, well, this safeguard mechanism has nothing to do with us. We are just going to stand on the sidelines. And what we are encouraging employees to do is say to their employer, we can't stand on the sidelines. We need to use our voice and say, "This is what needs to happen. It doesn't matter that we are not going to be impacted by it. This is what needs to happen in order that our society can achieve net zero emissions by 2050." So that's how we bring employees into that lobbying space. And I encourage people to read the playbook because I feel like it does offer some simple guidelines into understanding it.
Cody Simms (53:00):
How do employees even know where their company stands in this regard? What's the first place they should go to even understand the current state of affairs in the inside their company?
Lucy Piper (53:10):
I think it sits usually with your corporate affairs and PR teams is my understanding. But like I say, it is dark arts and lots of employees will read in the press where their company stands on something.
Cody Simms (53:28):
And I think your example that you gave was spot on. The same thing happened. I think everyone in the climate movement for the most part, and I don't want to say everyone, most many people in the climate movement have celebrated ultimately what's come out of the Inflation Reduction Act. But if we forget that that was basically dead, there was a bill that was in the house and had been passed in the house for nine months, maybe longer than that, that was trying to make its way through the Senate, which had a bunch of climate funding and ultimately didn't make it. And that became, it transformed itself into the inflation reduction act over time. But there was a big effort to try to get corporations to lobby and support of passing those climate provisions that didn't work, frankly. And it's a reminder that this is very real, and we could be living in a very different reality from a climate policy perspective hinging on one or two votes in the US Senate, which is terrifying for the whole globe, frankly.
Lucy Piper (54:28):
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely terrifying. But like you say, the corporate influence piece of that is critically important. And CEOs, executives boards are making decisions every day, and they are influenced by a bunch of different factors. They're influenced by regulators, they're influenced by investors, by customers, by their supply chain, and they are influenced by their employees.
(54:54):
So even if that is a case of getting your group of employees or doing your employee survey and asking your fellow staff members the question, "Do you think our company should take a public stance on X policy or Y campaign," and sending the results of that survey to your CEO, it might not achieve an immediate outcome, and it might not be something that you see the change happening from immediately, but that is going to add to the pressure that those boards and CEOs are experiencing from their activist shareholders and investors or from the external campaigns. So it's all about creating the environment for those decisions to be made so that companies are no longer sitting back and just enjoying this time where they can maximize profits when really what they need to be doing is investing in solving this problem.
Cody Simms (55:58):
Yeah, I mean, especially comparing their voting, their lobbying records with the public pledges that they're making in sustainability feels like a very powerful, very powerful lever that employees can use as well. Well, Lucy, listen, this is just been an amazing conversation. We've tackled so many different ways that individuals can take action inside their companies. What are the ways that you recommend anyone who's inspired to take action today can or should lean into the work you're doing?
Lucy Piper (56:32):
I would say check us out at workforclimate.org, and there's a bunch of free tools and resources available on there, so just have a read of some of the content. And if you find that you are interested in taking action at work and you get stuck into some of those free tools, then have a look at the courses that we've got available. We're currently producing an online course that will be available around the world, so that's an easy way in for people who are aspiring changemakers, but who don't know where to start.
(57:04):
And we also run a fellowship program for people who are maybe more established in having some of these conversations at work and really want to get stuck into some deeper change inside their company. So have a look at the fellowship and the courses that we offer and just reach out. We have a Slack community as well, so it's the most powerful element of this, as you would probably attest to Cody, is that when you have that community of people and peers reaching out to one another and sparking ideas and learning from each other, that is when change happens that we can't even imagine yet.
(57:40):
So jump into the Slack community, and I'd love to see you there.
Cody Simms (57:44):
Lucy. Thank you so much. Anything we should have covered or we didn't talk about today?
Lucy Piper (57:50):
No, I don't think so. We covered heaps.
Cody Simms (57:52):
All right. We covered heaps. I love it. That's a very good Australian way to end the conversation, and I so appreciate you joining us today, and thanks for your time.
Lucy Piper (58:02):
Thank you so much for having us on the show Cody.
Jason Jacobs (58:05):
Thanks again for joining us on My Climate Journey podcast. At MCJ Collective, we're all about power and collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem solving capacity. If you'd like to learn more about MCJ Collective, visit us at mcjcollective.com. And if you have a guest suggestion, let us know that via Twitter at MCJPod.
Yin Lu (58:32):
For weekly climate op-eds jobs, community events, and investment announcements from our MCJ venture funds. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter on our website.
Jason Jacobs (58:41):
Thanks, and see you next episode.