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Business sustainability innovation at SAP

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About

A series of virtual workshops designed to engage participants, gather data and inform future strategies to further connect employees with sustainability.

As a business with a strong ethos and values, SAP places a high value on business sustainability. SAP defines sustainability as the holistic management of societal, environmental and economic risks and opportunities for increased short and long term profitability.

SAP's challenge is to make the topic of business sustainability relevant, accessible and tangible for their people. Ultimately this involves providing context and meaning for their 60,000 staff who serve customers across over 130 countries worldwide. This introductory project with Impact helped them to understand how people at SAP viewed sustainability and how they could help them understand the business opportunity that sustainability presented to their technology company.

Impact worked with the Global Sustainability Team within SAP, based out of Palo Alto in California. Together we developed a short virtual workshop that would be delivered across eight offices serving seven countries/regions (Australia/New Zealand, Canada, China, Germany, Israel, UK and the USA).

The purpose of the workshop was two-fold:

  1. To gather useful data relating to sustainability within SAP to inform the creation of effective employee engagement strategies.
  2. To create engagement with sustainability directly through the approach and content of the workshops.

In order to achieve this, the design team from developed a 90 minute virtual workshop that provided a structured platform for energising, relevant discussions. Data was captured through a series of short questions, whilst discussion tools and tight facilitation ensured that every participant contributed to the discussions and kept the dialogue relevant to the topic.

The employee engagement in sustainabilty workshops generated a huge amount of useful data and information for the SAP sustainability team. Through this process, Impact and SAP were able to co-produce a report outlining the key aspects for SAP to address in order to further engage employees with sustainability and a roadmap detailing the implementation process. 

In addition to this, the workshops themselves enhanced the connections fo the sustainability team with SAP employees worldwide. Scores from questions asked at the start and finish of the workshop revealed an increased belief across participants that sustainability was central to SAP's mission as a business.

‘The work we did with Impact around employee engagement really helped us to get a pulse check on how people at SAP view sustainability and how we can help them understand the business opportunity that sustainability presents to us as a technology company.’ 

Rachel Parikh, Director, Sustainability

Testimonials
See what our customers say about us
Rachel Parikh
Director, Sustainability
SAP
"The work we did with Impact around employee engagement really helped us to get a pulse check on how people at SAP view sustainability and how we can help them understand the business opportunity that sustainability presents to us as a technology company."
Mirella Maffei
Strategy and Innovation Officer
Assimoco
“An intense, engaging journey with a highly generative impact"
Christopher Williams
Strategic Content Manager
Sony
“I see real benefits in terms of the operational efficiency of the business. We’ve had loads of really good examples where people have either driven forward existing projects or new projects.”