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Chidambaram Ganapathi, AVP, and Head – Digital Workplace Services, Infosys.
Climate change is no longer a problem of the future; it is for us to solve. A report by the United Nations released in February this year predicts that the Indian economy will be among the ones to be most harmed by climate change.
However, the COVID-19 lockdown revealed that it is indeed possible to reverse human degradation. As work shifted to home, we saw a positive impact on the Air Quality Index across India, including in some of the most polluted cities in the country.
Digital transformation has played a key role in enabling remote working, thus creating sustainable and resilient businesses. To understand how you can do this too, we need to look at digital transformation through three lenses:
Work:
To be sure, digital transformation of the workplace extends beyond having made remote working through digital collaboration a real possibility. It has helped digitise the workflow through automation, AI and collaborative apps and thus enhanced employee productivity and reduced paper use and printing.
But knowledge workers aren’t the only ones to have benefitted due to the digital transformation of businesses. Even industrial workers are at an advantage. Thanks to advancements in IoT, AR/VR technologies, and their applications in creating digital twins for smart manufacturing, frontline workers in manufacturing businesses can collaborate with their colleagues in the back offices more efficiently. Digitalisation has reduced the need for design and engineering teams to travel to plants to carry out most design and maintenance activities, thus increasing productivity and simultaneously reducing the business’ carbon footprint.
Workspace:
Similarly, there is a growing focus on making workspaces connected by leveraging IoT technologies to drive not just a seamless experience for the employees but also focus on creating carbon-neutral office spaces to meet the larger Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) goals.
Just as in smart buildings where we leverage data acquired by IoT devices to manage humidity, temperature, or even air purification of buildings, we can also create ideal conditions for habitability and optimise energy consumption. In large manufacturing units, we can ensure employee safety in plants that are spread across hundreds of acres.
Similarly, Industry 4.0 has been built on AI solutions for everything from improving asset reliability and operational efficiency thereby designing out redundancies and reducing waste while also increasing competency.
Towards that bp and Infosys are developing and piloting energy as a service (EaaS) solution that will help businesses improve the energy efficiency of their infrastructure and help meet their decarbonisation goals. The bp-Infosys digital platform will collect data from multiple energy assets and use AI to optimise the energy supply and demand for power, heat, cooling, and EV charging. Following a successful pilot, the platform will be rolled across all Infosys campuses in India and select clients to help manage energy and help reduce emissions.
Workforce:
Digital Transformation has also helped employees to focus less on manual, monotonous activities and more on purposeful work enabling a better work-life balance.
As digital transformation makes technology more and more accessible to people in the comfort of their homes, it has also helped make the workforce more diverse. For several people with special needs, a wider range of job openings can open up thanks to the new remote working culture thus helping create a more equitable society.
Much can be achieved at the intersection of work and the workforce by getting employees involved in ESG initiatives. Business leaders must make employees part of the sustainability initiatives around smart spaces through gamification, giving them green credits for participating in various sustainability initiatives around e-waste, food wastage in cafeterias, ridesharing or use of EVs, and other similar programmes.
For example, on our campuses, we practice the philosophy of reducing, reusing, and recycling. We use high-rate bioreactors whose efficiency is enhanced using automation to process food waste and generate biogas which offsets the usage of LPG in our food courts. We are working towards “Zero Waste to Landfill” by 2030. We recycle mixed garbage produced at our campuses, diverting it from landfills and contributing to the circular economy. In 2021-22, we diverted 122.65T from landfills which are 78% of the total mixed waste generated across campuses in India.
Our emission reduction strategies include transitioning to EVs for company-owned vehicles and promoting carpooling. We have done deep green retrofits in our existing buildings and invested in the efficient design of new ones. We use green data centers, and super-saver heat pumps and leverage smart automation in achieving energy efficiency.
What makes these initiatives promising is that there are now more and more young employees – both Millennials and Gen Z – that are seeking out businesses that engage with them to become greener. They seek purpose and meaning in their work and their lives and see the opportunity to contribute to the company's sustainability goals as rewarding. This doesn’t just help them continue earning their livelihood but also plays a role in securing their future from potential climate disasters.
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Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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