Hear from our Challengers
Here we would like to profile what our members are doing to meet the One in Five Challenge. In our first interview, Capgemini's Andrew Roberts answers our questions.
1. How do you think Capgemini's membership of the One in Five Challenge is going to affect your company?
"Changing the travel culture within our company is a challenge. Our company helps clients transform their businesses, and most of the time we need to be with them to do this.
However, reducing non-essential travel would benefit both our own staff and our clients. Our staff would be happy to avoid traffic jams, airport delays, and early starts or late arrivals home. Our clients pay for our travel, and will be happy if we can reduce costs.
Meeting this challenge is not about cutting valuable face-to-face time with clients or our teams – it’s about thinking about how we can be more selective about the travel we really need to do, and thinking about innovative ways we can continue to deliver for clients, enabled by videoconferencing and other collaborative technologies – where appropriate."
2. What do you think Capgemini will get out of the One in Five Challenge?
"The Challenge reinforces our existing corporate environmental objective ‘to reduce our carbon related to travel by more than 30% by 2014’. It provides a focal point and branding for that message. We hope to gain and share best practice in this area.
It should also help us position ourselves as a company that is taking the environment seriously with our own employees and with clients. The independent monitoring of how we’re doing will also provide us additional assurance and credibility."
3. How is Capgemini engaging with the One in Five Challenge so far? (e.g. engaging staff)
"We have established a cross-business team, under the executive sponsorship of our UK Chief Financial Officer.
We are focusing on providing robust, reliable technologies to give people credible alternatives to travel.
We are also developing a communications strategy to engage key travellers and ‘influencers’, to be rolled out in the new year – a key pillar of which will be the introduction of Carbon Travel Statements. We’ll also be revising our travel policy to make rail travel more attractive for key routes where it is a viable alternative to flying.
Our approach is to prove the concept first, focusing initially on internal travel, and to use this to demonstrate the carbon, cost and lifestyle benefits to our project teams and clients."