Core to Ergo’s culture is the belief that a profitable business is only truly successful if it has a positive societal impact on our customers, their customers, and the wider community. The area where we believe we can make the biggest and longest-term impact is around the environment and sustainability. Each year we look to improve our own business by reducing our carbon footprint through a variety of facility management initiatives:
-Procuring renewable electricity
-Best-practice waste management
-Investing in (and selling) energy efficient IT
-Buying paper from sustainable managed forests
Research* shows that businesses that run their IT on public cloud platforms will have a significantly reduced carbon footprint. We work with clients on cloud-first strategies where migrating applications and services to public clouds delivers a range of benefits, including environmental sustainability.* Cloud migrations can reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 60 million tons a year (Accenture ‘Green Behind Cloud’ report)
Ergo is a regular contributor to range of causes, and we have a committee that actively involves employees in fund-raising initiatives. We also encourage them to share our pursuit of sustainability, using public transport or biking to get to work, for example. We do not incentivize fossil fuel usage via expenses or a company car policy. Employees are encouraged to assess their own carbon footprint using ‘green calculators’ that we share with them.
We are particularly proud of the funds we have raised for the Make-A-Wish children’s charity, helping make wishes come true for children with life-threatening medical conditions. By pledging two percent of all monthly subscriptions generated by our Microsoft Azure services, Ergo uses what we do best to make a lasting impact on a deserving cause.
Ergo has been working closely with the Junior Entrepreneur Project for the past couple of years. The program works closely with the local community – involving local entrepreneurs who share their story and that of their business with the pupils. This puts entrepreneurship in a local and meaningful context. Every pupil gets a chance to uncover their own strengths and play a key role in one of five distinct teams – Finance, Marketing, Design & Production, Sales and Storytelling. John personally visits each school our appointed sponsor county that participates in the program and gives the pupils a talk on how he has made Ergo the success it is and what it’s truly like to be an entrepreneur.