BTN Group’s 2023 Sustainable Travel Program Award Winner – N. America & Europe
CASE STUDY: SALESFORCE
Sustainability is a deeply embedded cornerstone of the corporate travel program at customer relationship management technology giant Salesforce. What sets the organization apart, however, is the alignment of emissions reduction targets with executive compensation packages. The closer the company gets to achieving its environmental goals, the greater the rewards for its top execs—a mechanism designed to ensure that sustainable practices are supported right from the top.
At the core of the company’s travel-related sustainability efforts is the target of halving by 2030 its business travel emissions “intensity” compared with 2019, with intensity the amount of greenhouse gas emissions per unit of annual revenue. For 2022, Salesforce decided to make a portion of its top execs’ bonus payments contingent on the company meeting interim targets towards that goal.
For the company’s 2023 fiscal year, which ended Jan. 31, 2023, 10 percent of the annual performance-based bonus available to its executive officers was dependent on the company’s ESG performance, with half of that based on equality targets and half on sustainability goals. The latter was further divided into two parts: achievement in reducing air travel emissions intensity (including charter jet usage) and increasing the percentage of spend with suppliers who commit to Salesforce’s Sustainability Exhibit, a procurement contract designed to help the company and its suppliers reduce their collective carbon footprint and to set and meet science-based climate targets of their own.
Getting the Data Right
“The idea was developed by the sustainability team and they brought it to us in travel in 2021,” explained Jenny Sabineu, Salesforce manager of travel services and sustainability for Europe, the Middle East and Africa and Latin America. “We manage transaction data and we manage spend, but we’d never normalized or managed travel emissions alongside that spend, so the thought of being held accountable for producing emissions data that our executives were going to be compensated on was a little daunting.”
The company has reported on its business travel and commuting emissions—and offset them—since 2019, but the travel data was fragmented across different sources and suppliers and assessed only annually, so significant changes were required. Salesforce started offsetting all Scope 1 and 2 emissions in 2017.
During the implementation of its travel management company four years prior, a feed from the agency’s data lake into the company’s platform had been established for spend reporting purposes. “We were able to build an emissions reporting process off that feed that was already coming in. As a tech company, we have the stack to do that,” said Sabineu.
“We’ve turned it [emissions reporting] from a very manual process into an automated one and accelerated what we used to do from annually to quarterly,” she adds.
Sabineu said the project was “very cross-functional,” involving teams from sustainability, accounting, finance and operations, global travel and employee success, and consumed more than 600 hours of individuals’ time. It also complies with internal and external auditing procedures.
“We tied the executive compensation program specifically to air travel because we need to be rigorous about the data reporting—it’s the cleanest, most accurate data we have, and the vast majority [of travel] goes through our TMC and booking tool. Our hotel data is much more fragmented, for example,” said Sabineu.
In a proxy statement published in April, Salesforce reported it had exceeded both sustainability targets associated with its executive compensation scheme, and said the measures help “build accountability and accelerate our ESG initiatives”.
“This is the first year [for the reduction and measurement], but we’ve exceeded the interim targets,” said Sabineu, who explained that an intensity target was chosen because “the company continues to grow and we need to be out there in front of customers. There might come a time when we have to look at our targets and increase them. A 50 percent reduction might not be enough.”
With financial incentives backing such a public reduction commitment, tracking Salesforce travel emissions against goals has become a priority.
“We now measure both cost and carbon savings on a quarterly basis and have a weekly check-in to track and trend,” said Sabineu, who believes the program—and the carbon intensity metric, in particular—is a blueprint for other organizations for how to tackle carbon emissions in the face of growth. “[It] has ripple effects beyond our own operations,” she said.
Travel Sustainability Levers
In the meantime, the company continues to pull available levers as it works to reduce emissions intensity and its overall footprint.
Internal travel is in the firing line, with all such trips now considered exceptions and requiring EVP level approval. The company also is discouraging one-day trips and has seen a rise in longer, multipurpose trips.
“We raise reminders when someone is searching flights for a particular origin and destination combination to either extend their trip to make it more purposeful or to consider making it virtual,” said Sabineu. She cited Sydney-Melbourne and several U.S. pairings as prime examples.
Salesforce has worked to shift travelers to rail over the last three years, identifying 10 high-volume routes, mainly in Europe and the Northeast U.S., where it has been able to negotiate preferred rates. “We’ve been serving pop-up messaging and guidance on those specific routes when someone searches for flights, guiding them towards rail instead,” said Sabineu.
The company continues to offset the emissions it cannot avoid using what it calls high-quality, vetted offsets. And as a founding member of the First Movers Coalition, it also invests in carbon removal technology and purchases sustainable aviation fuel which it includes within its offsets rather than claiming as an emissions reduction.
Getting Personal
Coming later this year is a sustainability dashboard that will give employees and their managers visibility into the emissions they personally generate in each category of travel—air, hotel, ground, rail and personal car mileage.
“This will help individuals see the impact of the choices they make,” said Sabineu. “It will also help us assess and review the data and see how we’ve been able to shift modes of transport. We think there might also be the opportunity for more restrictive policies by country or region, for example—we see that as a lever for the future.”
The dashboard will enable comparisons with 2019 data and will be updated daily. Notably, it will feature only emissions information, not spend data, which is visible to managers via a separate dashboard.
“We do not want to get into the business of comparing whether emissions savings translate into monetary savings, because that might not always be the case. In our minds, that defeats the whole purpose of training and educating the business to reduce emissions,” said Sabineu.
The new dashboard will be piloted with select teams and could be rolled out to all employees by the end of the year. “We think it will generate some healthy competition. We want to educate the business so that when you’re thinking about T&E cost savings, you should be thinking equally about your emissions savings—it’s not one or the other,” said Sabineu.
Could trip emissions play a part in the approvals process one day? “It’s definitely something we could look at in the future,” she added.
“We’re building the tools now so that we have a bit of a runway for the business and time for everyone to get used to these tools,” Sabineu said, “so that when we have more stringent goals and targets, we will be equipped to meet them.”
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