How We Support Sustainability Year Round

NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / April 26, 2024 / Northern Trust

Each year, during the month of April, our attention turns to Earth Day and sustainability.

Here at Northern Trust, we are committed to exceeding environmental stewardship standards around the globe. We understand that our long-term financial prospects, and those of our clients and our global employee base, are tied to the health of the planet.

We have a number of initiatives in place to support our sustainability efforts and help us achieve our goal of reaching our net zero carbon for our business operations target by 2050.

It starts internally

We understand that what we do in the sustainability space must start internally. We must lead the way inside Northern Trust before we can look at external factors and influences.

With this in mind, we have introduced a new Sustainability Learning Hub at Northern Trust where employees can learn more about the role Northern Trust plays towards building a more sustainable future and importantly, how they can also help, through curated courses and materials.

Going green with candidates

We know that the societal and/or environmental mission and impact of a company is becoming increasingly important to candidates as they consider building their career with a new organization. To support this expectation, we now showcase our focus on sustainability in our job descriptions. We showcase and highlight for all to see our net zero carbon for business operations target by 2050.

We're also significantly reducing the amount of paper we use throughout our recruiting process. We have now successfully switched from paper copies for contracts and the various onboarding documents to electronic documents, reducing our paper usage significantly along with the travel and delivery aspect related to postage.

We no longer print handouts and booklets for information sessions or careers events en-masse anymore. Instead, we have successfully implemented the use of QR codes. Our aim here is to point candidates to our social media channels and our website for the more in-depth information they want.

Our candidates have told us that they want to do their own research on companies in their own time and on their own devices. Using QR codes allows us to meet those expectations and also deliver on our goal to reduce paper usage.

Reducing carbon emissions from our candidates and people

Hybrid Working - Our global business is now operating on a hybrid model with only 3 days required in the office per week. This has made a massive impact to the work life balance of our people and as a result has reduced the requirement for transport to work which is significantly reducing our overall carbon emissions.