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BT Group 2011
Organisational challenge/context
BT has a large and highly-mobile workforce, so it’s no surprise that travel and transport are a significant source of its CO2 emissions. BT has recognised this and now has world-leading sustainable travel and flexible working initiatives in place.
To honour its pledge to cut overall emissions by 80% from their 1997 level by 2020, BT had to cut these emissions significantly. The question was how. BT already buys fuel-efficient vehicles and encourage fuel-efficient driving.
To make a real difference, BT decided to go back and find out why journeys were being made and see what could be done to eliminate them.
Sustainable travel / Alternatives to travel intervention(s)
BT offers a range of conferencing services that are as effective a way of holding meetings as getting people together in one place. By changing the employees’ habits and establishing conferencing as the norm, BT cut the emissions resulting from car, train and air travel by 42% over two years.
But most of travel and transport emissions are generated as BT's field-forces go about their work, visiting premises to install and service lines and equipment for customers. Here, steps taken to improve the reliability of the network and increase the share of tasks completed correctly during the first (and therefore only) visit have had a significant impact, helping to cut the emissions generated as the field force goes about its work by 19% over the same period.
Overall, BT cut the travel and transport component of the carbon footprint by 27.5% over two years, but the environment wasn’t the only beneficiary of the changes made.
Results/benefits
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Researchers found that those employed by BT who work flexibly are 20% more productive than their office-based peers, partly because they spend less time travelling.
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Those who use conferencing to avoid the need to travel are significantly more productive as well. Researchers found that time worth £100 is saved every time travel to a meeting is avoided.
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Use of automated management tools has improved the productivity of BT’s field force by more than 36%.
By increasing the use of conferencing services, doing what it could to reduce the need for its engineers to visit customer premises and other locations and taking a number of other steps, it reduced the emissions caused by travel and transport by 7.9% in 2008/9 and 21.3% in 2009/10.
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In 2009/10 alone, the company’s employees avoided more than 33 million kilometres of company car travel and 6,700 tonnes of CO2 emissions by using audio, video and web conferencing services.
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During 2009/10 BT achieved a 45% reduction in emissions resulting from air travel. The number of flights made by employees was cut by more than 20% over the year – an achievement that made the company the first to meet the WWF’s One in Five Challenge.