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The benefits of sustainable corporate practices – BT

Tony Chan | October 21, 2009 | 1 Comment

Summary of presentation by Graham Smith, general manager, BT Australasia, Global Banking and Finance at the Green Telecom Session of the CommsDay Melbourne Congress.

While the current economic downturn may have dampen the focus on corporate sustainability, BT’s Smith outlined a number of sustainable practices implemented by BT over the past decade that has not only given the operator green credentials, but yielded measure benefits to the company’s bottom line.

Reiterating BT’s goal of reducing its CO2 emissions per unit of BT’s contribution to GDP by 80% from 1996 levels by 2020, Smith highlighted BT’s structure for becoming a more sustainable organisation. This included a framework that encompasses its workforce, its IT services, CRM operations, data centre optimisation and the use of unified communications technologies. All these areas then go through assessment, planning, implementation and monitoring phases.

One such initiative is BT’s policy towards a flexible workforce, which allows staff to work at home, or elsewhere outside the office. According to Smith, 73,000 workers, or 69% of BT’s UK workforce, are now considered flexible workers, while an additional 14,000 plus employees work entirely from home, who have proven to be 20% more productive than their office-based colleagues.

Some concrete benefits of the flexible workforce program include a 63% reduction in absenteeism, and the retention of 1,000 UK employees over the last two years. BT also posted maternity leave retention rate of 99% vs the UK average of 47%, saving €7.4 million annually in recruitment and replacement cost.

Additionally, the use of BT Conferencing helped removed the need for 1.5 million return journeys, saving BT staff the equivalent of 1,800 years of commuting time. Property estate cost was reduced by €750 million per year over the last 6 years. Travel costs was reduced by €39 million per year, and 12 million litres of petrol was saved a year.

As part of its data centre optimisation scheme, BT transformed and rationalised its applications, consolidated and virtualised its servers, retired legacy systems, resulting in a removal of 3,350 servers. The benefits were 52% savings, equalling a payback period of 14 months. Power consumption was reduced by 89%, or 2.5MW, saving 21.9GW/h of electricity per annum, equivalent to 9,400 tonnes of CO2.

The deployment of video conferencing rooms in the Asia Pacific region also helped reduced travel by 40%, yielding a payback period of less than 9 months, Smith said.