Bridgette McAdoo -Global Sustainability Officer at Genesys
Bridgette McAdoo leads the Global Sustainability practice at Genesys. She is responsible for sustainability as a management approach that holistically optimizes our economic, social, and environmental impact. In her role leading sustainability at Genesys, Bridgette drives our stakeholder engagement, education, and the evolution of the sustainable strategy and programs across Genesys. She also leverages sustainability metrics to track our non-financial performance and deliver integrated reports to our stakeholders
Bridgette has over 20 years of experience in sustainability leadership roles across multiple sectors, including the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), where she most recently led corporate strategy and engagement for WWF’s Freshwater and Food goals, Global Director of Sustainability for KFC, where she headed all sustainability issues for the brand, internally within Yum! Brands and externally with various sustainability stakeholders, and operations roles that were part of NASA’s Space Shuttle and Mars Rover programs.
She holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University and an MBA in Strategy from the Drucker School of Management.
Bridgette Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss:
Creating the foundation of sustainability at Genesys
Advice for finding and hiring good sustainability talent
Quantifying product use emissions
Strategies to align sustainability with work from home
Advice and recommendations for sustainability professionals
Bridgette's Responses:
Great to have you. Bridget, we're looking forward to the discussion. I already gave our listeners a little background on your professional life, but tell us a little bit about your personal life and what led you to be doing the work you're doing today.
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to delve into this discussion. As a daughter of the south, my formative years were shaped by the unique experiences of this region. My father, a military man, traveled to various locales but I ultimately graduated high school in Georgia. My journey continued at the illustrious Florida A&M University, where I studied engineering and transitioned into an engineering role after graduation.
I embarked on my professional journey with a brief stint in telecom, but soon found myself spending a significant portion of time as a contractor to NASA, adopting various roles. Despite the intrigue of working on shuttles and space stations, I began to crave more than just core engineering work. It became apparent that I needed to expand my horizons and explore the next steps of my career.
With this realization, I pursued a Master's in Business, where I delved into Peter Drucker's principles surrounding social innovation and corporate responsibility. The impact of these classes was transformative, leading me to understand that I wanted to have agency over my path and leave behind a legacy larger than myself. My newfound focus became sustainability.
Knowing I had to pivot disruptively from aerospace, I seized an opportunity at Yum Brands, working with the then Chief Sustainability Officer, Roger McClendon. This marked the start of my journey in sustainability more than a decade ago. The field resonates with me deeply as it harmoniously aligns my personal and professional values. It's a blessing to find such synergy, and I am enthusiastic about carrying this work across various industries. After all, sustainability is industry-agnostic. This allows me to help different companies live out their values purposefully through business initiatives and employee engagement.
Fantastic. Always great to hear about people's journey to the sustainability world. And also great to hear you were working with Roger. He's been on the podcast previously as well, and now leading some great work with the Green Sports Alliance.
Isn't he awesome, though?
Yeah, absolutely excellent. Bridget. Can you start just by giving our audience an overview of Genesys, the organization, maybe a little about what you do, the size and scope products, just so people are familiar with what the company does?
Certainly. At Genesys, a market leader in the Cloud Contact Center sector, we focus on orchestrating experiences through our technology. Powered by cloud, digital, and AI technologies, we enable our customers to realize this 'experience as a service.' Our vision is to deliver empathetic customer experiences at scale.
Our technology combines the efficiency and effectiveness of contact centers with the ability to listen, learn, understand, and predict with every interaction. This approach fosters more empathetic, trusted, long-term customer relationships, which is our primary focus.
Our leader, CEO Tony Bates, has always emphasized empathy as a core foundational truth of Genesys, a sentiment he expands upon in his book 'Empathy in Action.' Building a sustainability strategy and team around this foundational truth has been immensely rewarding. Sustainability and empathy are inherently interconnected, and the work I do is a reflection of our core identity at Genesys.
That's great. And I read the letter from your CEO in your previous sustainability report, mentioned it was your second year in your commitment to be a sustainable company and have more sustainable practices. So it sounds like the company is new, is early in their sustainability journey. Can you tell me about the work that you've been doing in these early years to create the foundation of your sustainability program and what that kind of work looks like?
I joined Genesys in December 2020, shortly after Tony, our CEO, had assumed his role. I was fortunate that he, along with our Chief Strategy Officer, Peter Graff, former Chief Sustainability Officer at SAP, were completely committed to sustainability. They understood the importance of a top-down integrated approach to sustainability, which was crucial when I joined the team. We wanted to make sure that there was work happening.
So I've heard a few of your other podcasts, and I know that a lot of people say, well, it was already happening within the company, right? And it should already be happening. It might not have been formalized, and it was already happening to an extent.
We were already looking at how we measure our emissions through product and use, especially through migrations. We already understood, what it would entail to have sustainability fully integrated across the organization. My job was to come in and truly make it clear what that was going to entail.
The first six months were about foundation building, looking at all the different processes and procedures that we needed to shore up to make sure that we could actually have a valid and solid viewpoint on who we were, create our vision and mission and strategy. I started to build my team, making sure that we had someone that could focus on environment and was well versed in our social governance of procurement, looking at product innovation.
We set our goals very early on in 2021 and knew that we wanted to start measuring those goals. So our first sustainability report is where we announced all of our different goals. We also announced our baseline for our emissions, but we also looked at we started going public around diversity commitments.
Our commitment is threefold:
To positively impact 1 million lives
To cultivate a workforce as diverse as the communities where we operate
To achieve carbon neutrality by 2030.
Of course, governance remains a constant priority.
From the outset, education and engagement were fundamental to our strategy. We established a team of Sustainability Ambassadors, made up of over 100 employee volunteers from around the globe. These ambassadors advocate, engage, and drive sustainability initiatives across the organization. Furthermore, I lead an internal council comprising key stakeholders and leaders from various functions to amplify this advocacy throughout the organization.
We did things like develop what we call Sustainability Month. So that April, we had every week devoted to a different pillar and a different topic. We've had speakers like Lisa Jackson from Apple and Jane Ewing from Walmart AWS.
So we hit the ground running heavy, really pushing the education and information through the organization. And because of that, sustainability is now one of our strategic business. KPIs so both our emissions goal and our diversity goal are a strategic business imperative for the entire company. And that's something I'm extremely excited and proud to see, because as sustainability leaders, we know one of the issues we have is if it's not truly part of the business, then the strategy falters. And for us at Genesys, it's part of our business.
Great. There's much to dive into here, and I believe our listeners can truly benefit from these insights. Let's start with your recent endeavor in building a sustainability team. Many companies are keen to hire sustainability professionals and expand their programs due to high demand. However, I've noticed with my clients that finding the right talent, especially at mid to senior levels, can be challenging. Since you've recently navigated this process, do you have any lessons or advice to share about identifying and recruiting top-tier sustainability talent?
One challenge in hiring sustainability talent, particularly for specific companies, can feel akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Hiring environmental managers or directors isn't as difficult, as many individuals have studied environmental science or engineering, and some may even have backgrounds in organizations like WWF or TNC. However, roles such as sustainable communications, sustainable marketing, and sustainable procurement can prove more challenging to fill.
My advice is to adopt a more flexible approach when evaluating talent. Passion often drives sustainability. Consequently, candidates might not have the exact background you're seeking, but they could possess other valuable attributes and transferable skills that can be developed as they learn more about sustainability and the science behind it. This potential should not be underestimated.
I've had team members who didn't come from a traditional sustainability background, yet their love and passion for the subject, coupled with their skills in other areas, made them invaluable assets. For instance, a talented engineer can aid with innovation, and someone who studied sustainability but primarily worked in procurement can be an asset in sustainable procurement.
We should avoid adhering too strictly to our preconceived notions of what sustainability should look like within our organizations. Ultimately, our goal is to become a center of excellence, with the work being integrated naturally within the function. If your team promotes diverse cross-functional support and builds these capacities and capabilities, then you'll stand a better chance of ensuring that sustainability becomes an organic extension of how everyone else in your organization works and lives.
Fantastic. Love to dive into some of these goals that you have established, one of them being the carbon neutral by 2030. I saw you reduced emissions 22% year over year from your 2021 Sustainability Report, and you've also signed on to the Climate Pledge, which is great. I think it's a net zero by 2040 commitment there. Tell us about your carbon neutral by 2030 and the work that you're doing to reduce emissions and how you plan to get there.
We take our commitment to achieving carbon neutrality seriously, reassessing our progress on a quarterly basis. Our emphasis is on reducing emissions organically and operationally rather than merely offsetting them, which we strive to achieve by focusing on several key areas.
One such area is our migration journey, which aligns seamlessly with our corporate objective of transitioning into a cloud-based company. Helping our customers migrate from on-premise to cloud solutions not only benefits them but also supports our progress towards carbon neutrality. As evident from our first, second, and third scopes, this migration journey constitutes a significant portion of our carbon footprint. Therefore, it serves as a crucial component of our strategy, and we're making substantial progress in this regard.
We also concentrate on the efficiency of our assets. As we open new offices or consolidate existing spaces, our goal is to achieve maximum energy efficiency. Our newly opened offices in Galway, Ireland, and Menlo Park, California, both of which have received LEED Platinum certification, illustrate our commitment to aligning our assets with our carbon neutrality goal.
Moreover, we are revising our travel policy and updating our supplier code of conduct with environmental guidelines. Through these initiatives, we aim to ensure that everyone is aware of the need for more mindful and responsible travel, engagement, and supply chain management.
To reach our carbon neutrality goal, we explore opportunities to invest in carbon offsetting and renewable energy projects. While we uphold our internal year-on-year reduction targets, we also recognize the importance of credible, authentic, and verifiable external projects. Consequently, we dedicate significant effort to due diligence, especially when forecasting year-end figures and deciding on project investments.
At present, we are identifying suitable projects for support. We were thrilled to join the Climate Pledge alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS), our key partner and the infrastructure host for Genesys Cloud CX. Their support has been indispensable in our migration journey and in effectively communicating our story. They've helped us develop use cases with different customers, allowing us to articulate the benefits of migrating from on-premise to cloud solutions from both technological and environmental perspectives.
That's great. And I think AWS has a goal to be 100% renewable by 2025, I believe.
Yes, we've been identifying different clouds that we're moving customers to that are already on renewable energy. And it's a great story to be able to tell.
Absolutely. It's impressive to hear all of this only two years into the process, especially considering the goals you've set by joining the Climate Pledge. One thing that stood out to me is how you're already quantifying these hard-to-quantify emission sources, which are obviously significant for a company like yours. Some companies report emissions for years without being able to comprehensively understand their product use emissions. I'm curious - considering it's your largest emission source, what was the experience like when trying to quantify emissions from product use? Is there anything you learned from this process or anything you'd like to share?
Indeed, managing our carbon footprint is a challenging process due to its manual nature. Our IT and finance teams are currently working on automation strategies, and we're onboarding a sustainability software that we have purchased. This tool will aggregate various inputs, facilitating a more efficient analysis of our emissions. We anticipate that the integration of this software will be completed by the end of this month. It's encouraging to have a dedicated database and software in place to aid us in this process.
This year, we have also pursued assurance to further verify our processes and data. While it might seem surprising that we would go through an assurance process in our second year, we decided to get our data category assured and verified to ensure our methodology was sound.
We maintain a database providing all our seat counts, allowing us to review the energy intensities and utilization of all the equipment in use. We also make assumptions about seat counts and energy intensities to calculate our product usage emissions. To ensure accuracy, we constantly update our factors and review our methodology.
We cross-verify our data with our finance and IT teams before we undertake the assurance process. As anyone involved in this work will agree, the challenge lies in aggregating diverse data points to form a coherent and accurate picture.
However, we're confident about our current methodology and feel reassured with its verification by our assurance partner.
Fantastic. Nice work. It should only get easier once you have that software on board so that's great.
I know. Fingers crossed.
Yes, I have another question regarding the shift to remote work and how you're addressing its implications. While there are evident sustainability benefits, such as reducing commuter emissions, there are also potential drawbacks, like increased energy consumption. Having thousands of employees each working from their individual homes may not be as energy-efficient as having them all in one building. I'm curious, can you share any strategies you've developed to align sustainability with remote work?
In the roles of Head of Real Estate and Facilities, my colleague and I have had numerous discussions regarding the uncertain impacts of the pandemic on both sustainability and real estate strategy. Last year marked the initiation of our first 'At Home Survey.' Mindful of not being intrusive, we designed the survey as voluntary but sought to understand the typical energy consumption patterns of our employees working from home.
We asked questions regarding the square footage of their homes, the number of residents, average utility bills, and more. By collecting this information, we could estimate average energy emissions from home-based work. Although only 10% of our global workforce participated in this first survey, it provided a substantial sample size for our initial research.
However, we learned that the complexity of our survey created a struggle for many respondents. It illuminated how much the average employee - or indeed, the average person - lacks awareness of their energy usage and daily habits. They often overlook factors like their computer's energy-saving settings, their sources of light and heat, or whether they use renewable energy sources like solar power. People outside the sustainability sector seldom think about such things. In response, we realized we must make this process easier for our employees.
One of our key learnings was the importance of understanding the average home energy use and the energy use of commuters. As a highly hybrid organization, many of our employees work from home, and we need to account for all these factors when considering our scope three emissions. Thus, our employee commuting figures include the results of our Work from Home survey and those who chose to commute to the office. Last year's data is heavily influenced by home workers, and we extrapolated these findings across our entire workforce.
Our Head of Facilities is dedicated to ensuring that our physical footprint accurately reflects our actual needs. We aim to optimally utilize our assets, instead of possessing underutilized ones. Moreover, she is equally committed to adapting our footprint to serve the requirements of our hybrid working environment.
In addition to these practical aspects, we also pay close attention to the emotional side. We are keen to maintain a sense of connection and community among our employees. Yesterday, for instance, we had a 'Day of Giving' across our offices in Indianapolis, Miller Park, and North Carolina. Employees volunteered, packed meals, and participated in other activities. Such events help even home-based employees feel part of our community.
We understand the importance of maintaining connection and community, addressing mental health, and treating our employees as whole individuals, even when they work from home. This holistic approach ensures that every team member feels valued, no matter where they carry out their work.
Terrific. On the topic of the social aspect of sustainability and societal impact, I believe many companies are striving to understand how they can measure their influence on communities and individuals. I understand that one of your objectives is to positively impact a million lives by 2030. Could you shed some light on what exactly this entails? How do you quantify such an impact and progress towards this million-person goal, and what strategies are you employing to achieve it?
Absolutely, we approach this goal through several different avenues. Volunteering and philanthropy form the backbone of our strategy. We're looking at our investment in communities and the number of individuals we're reaching through our work. For instance, our global food drive and food packing activities are key initiatives where our employees actively participate. This represents one segment of how we're aiming to impact lives.
Then we have programs around upcycling. For example, when decommissioning sites or renovating office spaces, we donate to local schools or shelters. The question here is, how many people do we serve through these actions?
Beyond that, we're also examining how our technology and products can be harnessed for good. We're collaborating with organizations like Be My Eyes, assisting visually impaired individuals through our technology, and working with Vibrant to support their suicide hotline. We're measuring the number of lives positively influenced by our support and technology empowerment efforts.
So, we're tackling this goal through crisis prevention and intervention, community reskilling and upskilling, volunteering, donations, and the use of our product for societal good. These are the dimensions we're exploring in order to continue positively impacting lives.
Our focus is increasingly shifting towards using our products for good, being proactive in crisis prevention, supporting suicide hotlines, and ensuring our technology can be utilized for the betterment of society. We aim to use our certification at Genesys to facilitate community reskilling and upskilling, particularly in underserved communities.
Achieving this goal is somewhat more challenging with a primarily remote workforce, but it's a commitment we're unwavering about. In order to drive these opportunities for our employees and communities, I work closely with our Chief Diversity Officer, Eric Thomas, and the head of our Impact Together initiative, David Littico. Together, we are coordinating efforts across our teams to make a positive difference and reach our goal of impacting a million lives by 2030.
And then another piece of the social component is internally, you have a goal to have a workforce as diverse as the markets you work in by 2030, which is only eight years away. Pretty ambitious. Having worked with technology companies where engineers are a big part of the workforce, I know they've struggled with increasing diversity in the workforce. Just the Stem pipeline doesn't have the diversity that is needed, really, to achieve ambitious goals right now. But I'm wondering, was it hard to get a goal like that approved, and what challenges do you think lie ahead?
Yes, Eric was appointed right after the tragic incident involving George Floyd. He's done an outstanding job of ensuring the leadership team grasps the importance of being intentional and transparent about our diversity goals. His team has become an integral part of our leadership, reminding us to not just discuss these matters at a high level, but to also dive deep into each of our respective teams, be it sales, engineering, HR, finance, or strategy, and evaluate where we stand.
Our focus remains unwavering when it comes to leadership goals, women, underrepresented groups, and workforce representation at large. This granular level of attention has ensured that we stay on track. Whenever we deliberate on succession planning or conduct our quarterly reviews, these aspects are always under review, never slipping out of sight. I believe this consistent attention is a crucial reason we've seen the progress that we have across our organization, although challenges remain.
To address these challenges, we've forged partnerships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to bolster our talent pipeline. We know that the talent is out there; we just need to intentionally seek it out. This means actively reaching out to specific HBCUs, such as Florida A&M and North Carolina A&T, engaging in conversations with various universities, not only locally in Indiana, North Carolina, and the Bay Area, but also internationally in places like Ireland, the UK, India, and Malaysia.
We're committed to addressing our needs directly. If we need more engineers specializing in a certain field, we're proactively reaching out to schools known for their programs in that area. We're broadening our horizons, venturing beyond the usual schools and events, to ensure we attract a diverse array of talent. This diversity of thought is key to driving our numbers in the right direction.
Sounds like a great foundation that you've been laying and a comprehensive approach and a lot of progress in a short period of time. So really exciting and congratulations. We're starting to run out of time. So we're going to jump into our final five questions. Bridget, if you're ready.
Okay.
What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers?
Don't underestimate the power of two words: value and differentiation. Value, because one, it's usually not a group that has P&L responsibility, but you need to show that you can drive pipeline, help with attrition and retention. You have to show all the value that sustainability brings to the business so that it's a value proposition, not just a buzzword. Differentiation is how do you use it to set you apart from your competitors? Use it as a way to help put the company in a different lens than it usually would, and show that value. Show all the intangible values of sustainability, not just the tangible ones, all the qualifiable values, not just the quantifiable ones. That will help you to really get it elevated versus it sitting in the middle of the organizations as some people struggle with.
What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability?
I'm excited that I'm starting to see a lot of emphasis on intersectionality. For so long I felt that people felt like they could only talk about one pillar at a time. It's either an environmental conversation or a diversity conversation or a governance conversation. But those should be integrated. There should be an integrated, holistic approach to how we look at sustainability, because when those things are looked at in tandem, when we integrate it, we get the real wins. I'm glad to see that even organizations are starting to restructure to be that way and not silo out the work. When that happens I just feel like the work is really not as impactful as it should be.
What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read?
Because of all the time reading all these white papers and case studies, I like to read things that are way more inspiring and motivating and so far away from sustainability. However, I just started reading Net Positive by Paul Polman and Andrew Winston. I'm enjoying that book. It highlights the way we look at traditional CSR or philanthropy or impact, however your organization refers to it, is just not adequate for where we are today. That we, as leaders in this space, really need to rethink about how we drive the business differently and how we can be the change that we want to see. Another book that has been extremely impactful is Stamped From the Beginning by Ibram X Kendi. It talks about and it details how racist ideas were created, spread and deeply rooted in society. It's thought-provoking and intense, but it's a fantastic read.
What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work?
I have a few different distribution lists that I'm on like GreebBiz Weekly. I get a lot of things where I can see a lot of articles. Our marketing team also does a fantastic job of scouring the industry or all the latest sustainability news to make sure that we can have a pulse on what's happening. So that's been extremely useful for me as having that inside outlook and then getting it from different shareholders or key stakeholders across sustainability when I get to see different articles. The climate pledge also being a part of that; you get to see what's happening across different signatories. It's always good to be able to benchmark and look how you're trending against all the different other companies that have the same commitments.
Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the work being done at Genesys?
You can always go to our website and you can visit genesys.com/sustainability to learn more about our sustainability initiatives, read our latest report, and stay up to date on our progress.