Yogesh Chauhan is director of ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) at HubSpot. His brief is to develop a new and impactful ESG strategy covering all HubSpot’s operations. He oversees a range of environmental, community engagement, reporting, innovation and thought leadership initiatives designed to embed sustainability and responsible business across the company. Prior to HubSpot, Yogesh Chauhan was director of corporate sustainability at Tata Consultancy Services for nine years. He was also the BBC’s chief adviser on corporate responsibility and environment and worked for the corporation for 12 years.

Yogesh Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss:

• Upstream and downstream supply chain challenges to reducing emissions as a SAS company

• Getting buy-in from leadership for SBTI or sustainability goals

• Activating the workforce around sustainability strategy

• Advice and recommendations for sustainability professionals

Yogesh’s Responses:

I’m looking forward to learning about the work that you're leading. I gave the listeners some background on your professional life, but can you start by just telling us a little bit about your personal life and what led you to be doing the work you're doing today?

Sure. I'm based in London and have been here for most of my adult life. Essentially, I grew up in an era where social issues and social change were at the fore. I started off my career with an idealistic view of wanting to change the world. While that has mellowed a bit over time, the desire to do good has remained constant. My career path has taken me in many different directions, from working for a media company to charities and tech companies. Nevertheless, the aspiration to do good has remained a consistent theme throughout my career.

Now, you're at HubSpot. For our listeners not familiar with the organization, could you provide a high-level overview of HubSpot? Can you describe what the company does and its size? I believe you were brought in fairly recently—correct me if I'm wrong, but you've been there for less than a year, haven't you?

That's correct. I started at HubSpot in February. Essentially, HubSpot is a SaaS (Service as a Software) company. We've developed and sell a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform aimed largely at small and medium-sized businesses worldwide. Our business has grown rapidly over the last few years, and we now employ seven and a half thousand people globally, across 13 locations. We have a significant presence in the US, where we are listed, and in Ireland. I'm based in London, and we're also expanding in cities like Berlin and Singapore. We've even opened new offices in Spain recently.

When you joined, did the company already have a sustainability employee or a strategy or program in place? Whether it did or didn't, what were your initial priorities and approach?

HubSpot had already accomplished quite a bit in the sustainability space, thanks to enthusiastic and committed individuals across the business who formed what we call a 'muscle group.' Their role was to identify the issues and suggest a direction of travel. As a result, my position as the Director of ESG was created. What attracted me to the role was the company itself and the opportunity to start with a blank slate. The ESG program was still in its infancy, particularly when I began.

What appealed to me about HubSpot was its mission: to help millions of organizations grow better. One of our core values is to build a company that future generations will be proud of. This idea and the culture that the company has nurtured caught my attention. It felt like the ideal job, as there was a great deal of goodwill towards engaging in the ESG agenda throughout the company. Also, I was granted considerable freedom to define and shape the direction we should take as a company.

For a technology company like HubSpot, which primarily offers cloud-based products and services, what are the key material sustainability areas that have been identified and are being focused on?

To some extent, the areas we focus on don't differ greatly from many other companies. The traditional pillars of ESG are still relevant to us. In terms of the environment, with seven and a half thousand employees and global offices involving significant business travel, we generate carbon. Our task is to manage and reduce our carbon footprint and our physical impact. As a technology company, we also have to consider the impact of our cloud-based technology and develop policies to reduce its carbon footprint. Socially, we focus on diversity, inclusion, and belonging.

We publish an annual diversity data report and place great emphasis on not only attracting and retaining a diverse workforce, but also providing opportunities for representation from various communities within our business and customer base.

Another aspect of our social impact is our contribution to the communities in which we operate, with a focus on employee volunteering, education, entrepreneurship, and community giving—last year, our contribution exceeded $8 million. In governance, we prioritize customer trust, ethical behavior, a diverse board, and transparent reporting. Although some of these areas of materiality are similar to other companies, as a tech company, the environmental impact from our cloud-based operations is significant and a key focus.

When discussing emissions for a SaaS company, could you tell us about the challenges? I'm unsure whether you use a lot of your own internal servers or outsource data management to other companies. What are the challenges in reducing emissions as a SaaS company and how do you plan to address them?

The primary source of our emissions comes from our cloud-based providers. We outsource the requirements for our digital technology, and the challenges related to this are that it falls within scope three, over which we don't have direct control. It becomes about engaging with our key providers, our cloud providers, and collaborating with them on carbon reduction. This involves first understanding our carbon footprint through the provision of their cloud services, then discussing strategies and plans for reducing that footprint. We've begun these discussions with our main cloud-based providers. It's more a partnership than a challenge—a conversation about what we can do, what seems realistic, and what timescales to set.

In addition to this upstream supply chain, there's the downstream one involving our customers and the impact of our technology's use by them. We're at an early stage in this journey, but we're interested in exploring how our customers can reduce their carbon footprint using our technology and how our technology can help with marketing techniques in a less carbon-intensive way. Finally, as a tech services provider to small and medium-sized businesses, we're interested in how we can assist them on their journey to manage their carbon footprint responsibly.

Looking at your upstream suppliers that are providing you with the cloud data storage, I know organizations like AWS have a goal to be 100% renewable energy by 2025. Are you asking those suppliers to also make those targets so that you can be more comfortable in setting your own scope three target, or are you perhaps looking to switch providers if they're not going to commit to renewable energy?

Our approach is rooted in partnership. We engage in meaningful dialogue with our existing suppliers to understand their plans, track their progress, and grasp their ambitions in this sector. If needed, we offer assistance and share knowledge to help them accelerate their journey, aligning it with the aspirations outlined in our science-based targets. Rather than adopting a rigid stance that might involve rejecting or discontinuing work with our current suppliers, we choose to foster and nurture our relationships with them. Our focus remains steadfastly on a partnership approach.

And I saw in your report that you were committing to SBTi planning to set science based targets. Have you now set those?

Yes, we have. We're at the committed stage, which you will find on the SBTi website. We have submitted our plans and roadmap for our tentative targets and we are waiting for the validation process to take place, which I hope will be quite early next year. Once that is done, then obviously our targets will be in the public domain.

Excellent. Can you share anything you learned from that process, any advice you might give others who are thinking about quantifying all their emissions and setting science-based targets and trying to get those approved.

Certainly, my foremost advice would be not to treat this lightly. This is a substantial undertaking and having an accurate and agreed-upon baseline is crucial. Another recommendation is to establish a network of key stakeholders within the organization. Their involvement will be vital to the success of meeting those targets. Setting these targets in isolation, then optimistically hoping they will be met is not practical. It requires a joint and collective effort across the business, involving various teams to fully understand both the current carbon footprint and the roadmap necessary for meeting those targets. In essence, prioritize collaboration, establish a solid baseline, and master data collection. These steps would be my key advice to anyone embarking on a similar journey.

Excellent. I'd love to hear this kind of ties into SBTi, but how it ties into the larger sustainability initiatives. Getting buy in from leadership when you approach them and mention science based targets, I think it's important we set this target or I think it's important we commit to a volunteer goal, whatever it might be. What's your approach to proposing that, getting that approved and getting that buy in across the organization, specifically with leadership?

Securing buy-in starts with thorough preparation. Any competent leadership will pose intricate questions about achieving targets without jeopardizing the existing business model or misjudging the journey ahead. Thus, doing your homework is essential. Engage in candid conversations with board members and individual contributors alike, striving to understand and assuage their concerns.

A pivotal part of this process is listening; pay close attention to what the leadership envisions for the business's future, and examine how a low-carbon journey can harmonize with this vision. From there, you can devise suitable targets.

That's the top-down perspective. There's also a bottom-up aspect that necessitates nurturing. Pay heed to your employees' views and aspirations. With a particularly young workforce, we find many individuals fervently advocating for a sustainable future. They want to contribute to a company committed to such a cause. It's important to nurture this passion and bring these individuals into the fold as part of this journey.

Achieving these targets will require a collective effort, not only from the leadership but also from the entire employee base and even prospective employees.

Yeah, absolutely, I love that. And once you have those employees, we understand that now we know we have a group of employees, employee base that is passionate about this and are looking to get engaged. Any advice on how to engage that workforce around your sustainability goals and targets? How do we activate them, get them engaged so that everyone is kind of contributing to the sustainability strategy?

There are several ways to encourage employees' commitment to sustainability. At HubSpot, we employ a variety of mechanisms, one of which includes our Employee Resource Groups, or Interest Groups as they're often called. We have a group called Eco at HubSpot, which is our most popular and engaged Interest Group. Comprising nearly 1,500 employees, this group identifies and discusses issues that matter to them individually and collectively. They share sustainable best practices and raise relevant company-wide issues.

Another approach is our regular employee engagement calls-to-action. These are not only about raising awareness but also encouraging individuals to take one step in their sustainability journey. Whether that's reducing business travel or embracing hybrid work practices to decrease their home's carbon footprint, the aim is to identify manageable, tangible steps that employees can take to contribute to the sustainability agenda.

Moreover, we aim to instill a 'sustainable mindset' in our employees. Regardless of their role—be it legal, marketing, coding, or design—we encourage everyone to apply a sustainability lens to their jobs. This mindset drives me to foster sustainable working practices that our employees can integrate into their daily routine as part of their core work, furthering our company-wide sustainability agenda.

In addition to these practices, we provide a wealth of resources, information sharing, training, and learning opportunities for our employees. One such initiative is the Climate College, an immersive learning experience about the science of climate change. It takes our employees on a journey of understanding climate dynamics, the factors affecting global warming, and potential future scenarios. This immersion introduces them to the technical concepts around climate change and the work done by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Are you a team of one there as far as sustainability?

No, I'm not actually. We have a small core team which includes myself and several others. But we have a large number of individuals who as part of their job are part of what I call team sustainability. So whilst they might not be part of the sustainability team, I describe them as team Sustainability which is that we have a person in communications, we have a few people in recruitment, etc who are part of the broader team, who are driving the sustainability agenda working with me. And that group is getting bigger and works cross-functionally in all sorts of different departments and teams within the business. They are part and parcel of some of the work I'm driving.

That's fantastic. And you mentioned they have sustainability as some percentage of their formal responsibilities.

Absolutely.

That's great. And it's growing more they're embedding that into more job responsibilities.

Yes, and I personally think that is the secret sauce in terms of driving a successful sustainability agenda in any business around basically not restricting sustainability and the application of sustainability to a small core team. It is very much about infusing it across the business and trying to bring as many folks as you possibly can and the more people that have a sliver of their job that is driving sustainability, whether formally or informally the better.

Couldn't agree more. That's great to hear Yogesh and the team is clearly making some strides and is building a strong foundation to move your program forward. So congrats on all of that. We're going to jump into our final five questions if you're ready.

Sure, fire away.

What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers?

Authenticity. My advice to all sustainability professionals is don't get tempted to say and do things that really are not authentic and genuine in terms of how you are driving the sustainability agenda, because you will get caught in the greenwashing mill. Authenticity would be my key advice. Be authentic as much as you possibly can.

What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability?

I would say sustainable innovation is something that I'm really getting excited about. Whether that's things like green aviation fuel, more sustainable building materials that are coming on stream, scaling renewable energy and the dramatic reduction in costs for renewable infrastructure, and what we see visibly now amongst most populations is the change in lifestyles that people are beginning to adopt and consumers making individual choices. Those are the things that really excite me. As part of that innovation, there's obviously a whole leap of technology that is being built to drive a more sustainable future, whether that's digital technology or engineering technology, and those are the bits that really do excite me.

What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read?

Just looking at my bookshelf at the moment, what caught my eye is the Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom. It's just a tiny little book with a few quotes on each page, and it isn't about sustainability. It's rather about the broader concepts that drive sustainability, the essence of being. What does contentment mean? What does joy mean? What does the art of giving and receiving mean? I think once you get that into your system and start to live and breathe those core beliefs that are ingrained in us as human beings, from that flows a sustainability mindset. I would recommend people have that by their side and consult that now just to get a sense of realism about what life is all about.

What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work?

Well, actually HubSpot has a number of publications that are part of independent publications but are owned by HubSpot. There's something called The Daily Hustle and the Weekly Trends, again not directly about sustainability, but actually very much about innovation, new ideas, and really capturing the essence of the energy behind startups and small and medium-sized businesses, and all the creative ideas and innovations that are coming out from that. That always gives me a huge amount of inspiration, because nearly always there are things that are going on that people are inventing, developing new business models, new business ideas that have a sustainability focus. At the professional end for the sustainability practitioners, I would say McKinsey's website and podcasts tend to be my go-to on a regular basis. Finally, friends and colleagues that I've kind of nurtured and developed over the years and the opportunity to bounce ideas off and have conversations all things sustainability with.

Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the sustainability work being done at HubSpot?

HubSpot has a website which is engaging, lively, and has lots and lots of information. I would encourage everyone who's interested to go there. We have a sustainability section that's got lots of information about what we are doing, including the current report as well. If anyone wants to connect with me directly, then LinkedIn would be the place I would recommend.