Team.blue is European market leader in hosting solutions for SMEs and from this key position wants to play an exemplary role in the field of sustainability. Vanessa De Waele, Group Sustainability & Legal Director at team.blue explains how she sees this.
Corporate Social Responsibility is a term that covers many things. What is team.blue currently doing in this field?
Vanessa: ‘Yes, there's a lot you can do. It implies setting priorities and not doing certain things. We focus on the environment and we want to stay very close to our business and our community. The hosting business uses a lot of energy, which is why we're focusing primarily on the energy consumption of our data centres. All our data centres in Europe run on renewable energy now. We've set carbon targets that we need to achieve in the future, we aim to make great strides in this and play a leading role.’
In other words, you measure your carbon footprint?
Vanessa: ‘To measure is to know. During a first measurement, our data may not have been complete, but the resulting information was very valuable. In fact, we share these data on a platform that's accessible to everyone in the organisation. During a second measurement we compared our data to the public data of companies in our sector. We found that we scored very well without having made any specific efforts or extra investments. It gave us the energy to want to become best in class.’
‘Look for your sweet spots, because that's where you can inspire people.’
It goes further for you than just reducing carbon emissions and power consumption?
Vanessa: ‘Absolutely. It's important you have a holistic idea of what sustainability can mean. In our sector – which is still a man's world – diversity is very important. Team.blue employs more women than is standard in our industry. We want to be as inclusive as possible and for us that goes beyond gender diversity. On the one hand this is translated in our hiring policy. But we also ensure important decisions are not made by people who all have the same profile. This means sustainability is also about HR and governance for us.’
How did you build a sustainability strategy?
Vanessa: ‘You can take a very broad approach, but then you run the risk of not having any direction in your strategy. You have to depart from your position in your sector and reflect on the areas where you can have the greatest impact. Look for your sweet spots, because that's where you can inspire people. Like DNS Belgium is also doing. There are plenty of quick wins in the beginning of course, i.e. power consumption on the shop floor, the car policy – although in Belgium this is still a difficult topic. But most of all it's about common sense in the choices you make.’
What was the motivation to start?
Vanessa: ‘The feeling that sustainability is very much alive within the community: customers, workers, applicants and other stakeholders effectively ask us about our engagement and what we want to achieve. When customers calculate their carbon footprint, they also need to know their suppliers' carbon footprint, including ours in other words.
‘Our customers are SMEs. When you consider this SME community as an ecosystem, you see some great interactions developing. We strongly believe in the ecosystem and partnerships are very important in this respect. We have to join forces to increase our impact together.’
What specific goals have you set?
Vanessa: ‘The big ambition is to become carbon neutral. We also want to achieve the B Corp certificate (see box). When determining a sustainability strategy I wanted a good framework. I found the ESG framework too corporate. My preference went to a model that could be used as a roadmap. B Corp gave me a good insight into possible actions. We coupled specific goals to every one of the framework's five pillars.’
What is B Corp?
B Corp-certification is an international certification for companies with a big, positive impact on human health and the environment. There are five pillars: governance, environment, workers, customers and community. To achieve the certificate an organisation needs to earn a minimum score of 80 out of 200 points and undergo an assessment.
‘To make your initiatives concrete and visible, it's important to take a local approach and to let it develop bottom-up.’
How do you communicate about CSR and how important is the ‘image’ aspect in this?
Vanessa: ‘I think extremely transparent communication is very important. You shouldn't be bragging about your fantastic figures. You should be sharing insights and best practices, and inspiring people with the small things you do. That makes it tangible for others.’
How do you involve your employees in the sustainability narrative?
‘An international group should not be communicating about what they want to do and what they expect from their employees. To make your initiatives concrete and visible, it's important to take a local approach and to let it develop bottom-up. Team.blue profiles itself as a big international group, but our employees asked us to launch local initiatives. Often this is about wellbeing, charity, etc. It creates involvement and automatically local embedding too.’
How has Corporate Social Responsibility changed team.blue as an organisation?
Vanessa: ‘It has had a clear impact on hiring and employee retention. The new generation feels very strongly about sustainability. Vague promises are not good enough: they want specific action. When you do it well, they're engaged and will stay. It also has an impact on procurement, because it affects the choice of our suppliers. In our organisation this choice is coupled to specific KPIs. Some are non-negotiable, others nice-to-have. We're not yet at the point of having a maturity matrix, but we do have a checklist.’
‘Of course, we also couple sustainability goals to other decisions the organisation makes, and we try to formalise that. For example, the decision to promote employees also needs to be evaluated based on their contribution to certain sustainability goals. For acquisitions, during and after the due diligence phase, we also check to see if a minimum standard is maintained and how the company can contribute to our narrative.’
Team.blue is an international group created in 2019 through the merger of three hosting companies: Combell Group, TransIP Group and Record Group.
By clicking here you can read everything about team.blue's sustainability efforts. You can also download their impact report.
Share your story and inspire others!
Are you a .be registrar who is socially responsible and would like to share your story to inspire others? Then feel free to contact us.
With this article, we support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.