Earth Day at Chess

Stephen Dracup, COO at Chess, explains how Chess celebrated Earth Day. He covers:

• Jump to The new Chess Green Team >
• Jump to Our People’s Green Pledges >

Over the last two years, Chess has made huge steps in reducing its carbon footprint. One of the biggest successes has been the move to Home First where over 95% of our people work from home and conduct business meetings using Microsoft Teams.

The move to Home First and Hybrid Working has allowed us to significantly reduce our office space and has almost eliminated the daily commute to work, which has helped us to reduce our carbon footprint.

What to consider when going hybrid

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Chess Green Team

We have a Green Team made up of 20 people from all over the business who want to contribute more to helping combat climate change.

Their mission is to protect and care for the environment by engaging with our People, Customers, and Suppliers to encourage them to lead an environmentally conscious lifestyle thus playing our part in achieving climate change targets.

We set up a Teams channel so people could keep each other updated and post ideas and pictures celebrating the efforts of their teams within Chess. We also created and attached a simple SharePoint site within the Green Team Channel and loaded it with top tips and links to other content that will help educate our people on best practices for leading an eco-friendly lifestyle.

Work better together with SharePoint

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We then ran a series of focused days where each day we highlighted a specific area:

Day 1 - Carbon Footprint

We encouraged our people to take a simple survey to calculate their own Carbon Footprint. This was incredibly popular and allowed us to see what areas of our lifestyle were causing the most damage to the environment.

Day 2 - Top Tips for Home

We focused on how you could make your home more eco-friendly with top tips on subjects like recycling and home heating.

Day 3 - Top Tips for Lifestyle

We focused on how you could make your lifestyle eco-friendlier with information and advice on diet, gardens, and sustainability for children.

Day 4 - Earth Day

We encouraged teams to come together and celebrate Earth Day with a team photo and for individual people to pledge the actions they were going to take for a greener life.

Our People’s Green Pledges

Our Green Team decided to use Earth Day as a springboard to encourage our people to pledge to take small steps to minimise their impact on the environment.

Over 50 people took the pledge and we are hoping to get more this week with over 30 teams taking part and really enjoying the day. Not only did we take some small steps to help the environment, but we also helped bring our people together and had a lot of fun!

If you want to run a similar event we would be delighted to help – please feel free to drop us an email at greenteam@chessict.co.uk and we will see what we can do.