GOOD WORK
NEEDS A GOOD CLIMATE

Doing the right thing

An intact environment is a requirement for doing successful business. Why? Because people can only realise their potential if they have good and healthy living and working conditions. Therefore, we regard climate and resource protection as essential, both from an ecological and an economic perspective.

“Doing the right thing” – based on this central corporate value, we have made the fight against climate change a central aspect of our corporate responsibility. Since the end of 2021, Hays is a carbon neutral organisation. We are proud of that. However, this is no reason for us to sit back. While we are currently still focusing on the offsetting of greenhouse gas emissions in many areas, we are going to reduce them more and more in the future.

For this purpose, we continuously quantify our emissions to identify the areas in which we can reduce them. By 2030 at the latest, we aim to cut our global emissions by 50 percent compared to the levels in 2020. You can find more information about our global climate goals here.

Green business

We also aspire to thinking further and considering how our expertise in specialised HR services can help implement the decisions of the Paris climate accord – in other words, how we can contribute to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. According to estimates by the International Labour Organization (ILO) of the United Nations, the green economy will create about 24 million jobs in the coming years. Recruiting experts for positions in climate and environmental protection already plays an important role for our customer businesses. To ensure that we can provide even better support to businesses around the world in this area, we are building relevant talent pools.

Renewable energies: Since 2014, the electricity for all our branch offices has come exclusively from renewable energy sources. The same applies to new branch offices.

Good accessibility: We choose locations for our branch offices that are easily accessible by public transport and near a railway station, if possible.

Digital connectivity: All of our employees at the different sites are connected to one another via a digital communication platform. We equipped all branch offices to use video conferencing, making many business trips obsolete.

Digital signature: Where possible, we use digital signatures in contract management to speed up processes and save paper.

Offset

In order to achieve “Carbon Zero”, we compensate the amount of emissions that we cannot save. To achieve this, we are working with a renowned company: ClimatePartner calculates and analyses our emissions and supports us in target modelling. In addition, the company verifies our emissions data and acquires internationally certified carbon credits on climate protection projects for us.

In the short and medium term, we have invested in a reforestation project in eastern Uruguay: The Guanare project encompasses 22,000 hectares of previously degraded agricultural areas to be regenerated to forest – with the aim of storing about seven million tons of CO₂ over the course of the project and to annually absorb almost 130,000 tons of CO₂. The project has been independently reviewed and supports five of the United Nations goals for sustainable development (UN SDGs). In the long term, we will focus on innovative investments in carbon sequestration to physically remove CO₂ from the atmosphere.

Hays has been carbon neutral since the end of 2021.