AUTOMATION DRIVE

When consulting giant EY made a public commitment in 2021 to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and reach net zero by 2025, the travel, meetings and events team knew they were in for a challenge.

“Business travel represents more than 70 perc ent of our overall carbon emissions, so we have a massive role to play,” says EY’s global head of travel, meetings and events, Karen Hutchings.

The company has pledged to educe absolute emissions by 40 per cent across Scopes 1, 2 and 3 by 2025, against a 2019 baseline, and then plans to remove or offset more than the remaining amount of emissions every year.

When the ambitious target was announced, and subsequently approved by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), Hutchings and her team “had a seat at the table” when senior leaders gathered to discuss exactly how the business would achieve its goals.

“We were able to make recommendations to change our travel policy and drive behaviour change [among our travellers] so that we can achieve our goals without having to offset,” Hutchings explains. “As it stands, we’re on track to deliver to that [2025] goal because we’ve put in place some simple directives to change behaviour.”

This included three key policy changes. The first was eliminating day trips, the second was encouraging rail over air travel, and the third involved introducing a new meetings and events policy to encourage face-to-face meetings to be held in venues that are easily accessible via public transport and where at least half of the meals served are vegetarian, “as meat accounts for nearly 60 per cent of all greenhouse gases” generated by food production, says Hutchings.

WALKING THE TALK

Policy change can be easy to make on paper, but implementation is the biggest hurdle. With some 150,000 travellers in its programme, EY turned to automation to “nudge” travellers toward making more sustainable choices.

“Behind the scenes, we’ve assessed every air route that has a viable rail option and anyone who books an air ticket on one of these routes will be ‘pinged’ shortly afterwards [with a message that says] ‘you’ve booked a flight on this route, however, we recommend from a sustainability perspective that you take the train, so please go ahead and cancel your air travel’. We’ve set this up for hundreds of city pairs,” Hutchings explains.

Automated messages also alert travellers when out-of-policy bookings occur and encourage the use of virtual meeting tools as an alternative to travel.

All of the above features are wrapped up in the EY Sustainable Travel Approval Tool, or STAT, which the travel, meetings and events team co-developed with IBM over an eight-month period and launched, first in the US, in 2022. With the aim of providing travellers greater visibility on their carbon footprint based on the travel choice they make, STAT has since been deployed in 41 countries.

“Where it really resonates is where there is a viable rail option to air [travel],” Hutchings says. “[STAT] gives really clear comparisons between the impact of emissions from air versus rail. It shows that in numbers, but it also tells travellers how long would it take a tree to grow to offset the decision they’ve made, or how many houses could be lit and for how many hours [with the same amount of emissions].”

The key to driving behaviour change – and the success behind EY's STAT, according to Hutchings – is the ability to make data relatable. “It’s one thing to be told that you have to do something, but if there’s no real reason as to why that makes sense, then it’s hard for people to understand why they’re doing it,” she says.

“We’ve seen so many tools out there that quote a lot of numbers, but unless you’re an ESG expert, no one knows what these numbers actually mean. We want to make sure [our travellers] are fueled with the information they need to make the right decision. And as we see it, current online booking tools don’t have the ability to provide information that’s relatable… So, with STAT, we wanted to make [emissions data] understandable, tangible and relatable to our employees.”

Travellers must gain approval via STAT prior to accessing EY’s online booking tool, however Hutchings says she is talking to different companies to see how the tools can be better integrated.

Line managers – or those responsible for approving travel requests – also receive automated updates via STAT and are notified as to the number of people they’ve approved to go on a particular trip against an engagement code or destination date, Hutchings explains.

“The tool takes the emphasis away from cost and puts it squarely on emissions. So, approval is based on emissions with an FYI of the cost, not the other way around,” she says. “Because if people don’t travel as much, we’re going save the organisation money anyway. So, we don’t need to focus on cost savings because better decisions will drive that.”

And the proof is in the pudding. Since the release of EY STAT, same-day trips have dropped 15 per cent globally. Rail bookings in countries where the tool has been deployed have increased to 25 per cent of all bookings. And for one participating firm where there is an extensive rail network, EY’s rail bookings increased from 20 per cent to 63 per cent following implementation of the approval tool. Overall, rail bookings have increased to 22 per cent of all travel bookings, compared with 10 per cent in 2019. 

GLOBAL GOALS, LOCAL REALITIES

As one of the Big Four accounting firms, EY has more than 700 offices in more than 150 countries and while the company’s member firms are guided by global ESG goals, these are often translated into local travel policies.

“There was a socialisation that happened when the global [carbon emissions reduction] goal was set, and so everybody from the member firms would have bought into that concept,” Hutchings explains. “But the reality can be quite different. There are some markets where sustainability is not high on the priority list from a cultural or governmental perspective, so we’re helping [travellers and stakeholders in] those countries instigate change.”

Hutchings says the travel, meetings and events team has “taken it upon ourselves” to oversee rollout of EY STAT, ensuring regional and local stakeholders were informed about travel policy changes and were presented with the business case behind STAT.

“Because so much of our carbon emissions come from business travel, it’s our job to ensure EY’s ESG goals are adhered to… this has given us something completely different to get involved with. It’s given us leadership,” says Hutchings.

On top of individual traveller dashboards that chart carbon emissions, a monthly emissions dashboard is shared with key regional stakeholders to chart how member firm countries and service lines are tracking against their carbon budgets.

While EY implemented carbon budgets last July, Hutchings says “we don’t insist on decisions made against it”. However, travel emissions dashboards are “certainly part of the teams’ business reviews with service lines” to ensure the company meets its goals, she says.

PUSHING TECH FURTHER

Air and ground transport are the current focus of EY’s carbon emissions measurement, however Hutchings and her team are now “doing a lot of work” with a select number of hotel providers in order to integrate emissions data linked to hotel usage as part of STAT.

“Measuring individual hotels is where we want to get to,” Hutchings says. “We want to be able to make recommendations to our employees that say. ‘If you select this hotel based on various criteria, it is recommended over another,’ but that’s still a work in progress and we’re using third parties to help build that.”

To meet the needs of its young employee base – the average age of EY employees is 27 – the company is also looking to integrate gamification into STAT, along with the ability to earn an “eco badge” based on sustainable travel choices.

“We’ve gone out and gathered feedback so that we can develop the right tools to help drive change,” says Hutchings. “We love the challenge because it’s given us an opportunity to showcase the innovation that we have in the team.”