Dwellworks - Destination Services and Global Mobility - ESG

Five Essential Steps to Make Sustainability and DEI a Priority in Global Mobility

How Dwellworks is Leading ESG Initiatives

Corporations are increasingly committed to ESG reporting. ESG stands for “environment, social and governance.” ESG initiatives, especially ESG-related facts and data, are used by companies to meet the requirements of their stakeholders, including clients, customers, employees, investors, regulators, and local communities, to understand a business beyond its core financial performance. For example, stakeholders want to know about responsible environmental actions.

"Dwellworks has set a goal to reduce our core greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030."

This is in line with the Paris Agreement and generally accepted science standards. We began publishing an ESG Impact Report in mid-2021 to be transparent about our plans and progress. You can read our latest 2022-2023 ESG Impact Report here. Below you will find more information on how any company can take their ESG initiative from good to great, based on some of our core practices.

WHY have an ESG program?

ESG programs developed in response to a need from investors to have reliable, objective decision-making data to assess corporate performance, beyond financial and operating results. At the same time, the UN and other global agencies looked to align corporations and investors with The UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As investors, corporations, and other stakeholders began looking at broader performance criteria, data requirements began to be developed to support the efforts described in corporate social responsibility narratives.

High impact climate events, questions about resiliency coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic, and increased demands for equity, inclusion, human rights, and fair employment practices have all contributed to more requests for information and an organized way for summarizing actions and results.

HOW ESG impacts global mobility and business travel

Relocation and business travel are directly associated with ESG.

  • Various researchers attribute the environmental impact of business airline travel alone as contributing between 2-5% of the earth’s total annual greenhouse gas emissions of 53 billion tons of carbon.
  • Add in temporary housing stays, hotel stays, air, sea, and overland shipment of goods, plus local area tours for renting and home buying, and the carbon cost of relocation quickly accelerates.

Similarly, on social topics, workforce mobility presents a tremendous opportunity for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Approximately 70% of Gen Z and millennial professionals express an interest in global assignments, whether for short and long-term relocations, project work, or extended business travel. In offering these opportunities as building blocks for their talent base, companies have an unprecedented opportunity to hire more representative, more diverse professionals to fuel their global growth in a culturally aligned way.

Employers are currently reviewing mobility and business travel policies and practices, recognizing that historic solutions are no longer relevant to how employees identify today, and offering the support employees need for successful moves to new locations.

Governance, too, is key in global mobility and travel. Business needs, duty of care, data privacy, and policies and practices must also align with corporate requirements and local regulations. Without good governance, secure systems, and compliant operations and supply chains, no company can deliver and measure sustained solutions for environmental and social impact.

HOW does Dwellworks approach ESG?

As a global solutions provider for relocation-related services, Dwellworks was an early adopter of ESG initiatives. Our core values of integrity, teamwork, performance, innovation, and fun all align with the requirements needed to build programs that are ethically, socially, and environmentally responsible. Our bias to action, operational excellence, and lean agile project management methodology were key in establishing workable goals and measuring incremental but relentless progress. With a global footprint, 500,000+ destination services and corporate housing transactions supporting our analytics, and a proven track record for launching MVPs and building on what we learn, Dwellworks committed to a formal ESG program in January 2021.

Our multi-year roadmap includes 6 essential steps:

  1. Start with governance. It’s tempting to jump in around environmental projects and ambitious hiring and talent programs, but in our experience, it’s better to build the framework first. Governance speeds up other actions, like having the documentation to respond to RFPs and certification authorities and keeping track of data from day one. This well-governed process earned Dwellworks an EcoVadis Silver Rating and multiple client sustainability awards because we were able to quickly define programs and actions once we understood core requirements and expanded on our existing well-documented policies and protocols.
  2. Build the plan around stakeholders. Clients want solutions that support their employees and their business goals; internal associates want to work with a company that’s making a difference; suppliers want guidelines and context; investors want evidence of governance and results; and communities want engagement and investment in shared local futures. We built our ESG initiative knowing we would need to respond to all these stakeholders.
  3. Set reasonable goals and make incremental progress. Through our ESG Steering Committee, we established three strategic goals:
    • Reduce our core greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030
    • Be recognized as an employer and partner of choice based on our performance in diversity, equity, and inclusion globally
    • Be recognized and selected as a service partner based on the unique strength of our governance, compliance, and risk management/value creation for clients.
  4. Own the results and work in partnership. ESG is all about measurement and results. Rather than reinventing the wheel, Dwellworks works with well-established tools for carbon emissions calculations and compliant social program frameworks. We align with organizations like CHPA, ASAP, EuRA, Worldwide ERC, and the Coalition for Greener Mobility to achieve faster outcomes through collaboration and shared standards.
  5. Report often and transparently. From the beginning, Dwellworks has published its ESG results. Capturing data is a challenge with distributed supply chains and post-pandemic stabilization, but we remain committed to data-driven reporting and transparency.

WANT to learn more?

Download and review our 2022-2023 ESG Impact Report. Every company will have its own path, but we hope the report provides a useful blueprint for program design, as well as an overview of Dwellworks ESG goals, performance, and progress. Need more support? Feel free to email us at [email protected].

 

About Dwellworks

Dwellworks is the world’s largest provider of destination-related services and temporary living solutions for the globally mobile workforce and business travelers. We provide business-to-business solutions for Fortune 1000 and emerging companies directly and through their relocation management partners. Whether a company needs to relocate its employees across the world or the country, we provide a range of support services to help employees and their families transition successfully from their home location to a new destination. 

Dwellworks operates according to our core values of Integrity, Teamwork, Performance, Innovation, and Fun. These are the root of everything we do – from the Teamwork aspect of sourcing and supporting our helpful local Consultants to assist any relocating employee in hundreds of cities worldwide with their move, to the Integrity of our highly-trained Intercultural experts who are here to help transferees adjust to new cultures and confidently settle into their destination locations, to the Innovation of our myDwellworks® technology platform that familiarizes employees on assignment with their destination and enables customized conversations on properties, schools, and situation-specific needs.   

Dwellworks supports the diversity of our clients’ globally mobile workforce with personalized destination solutions in 16 countries, covering major relocation markets. Dwellworks has consistently responded to the mobility services and needs of our global clients. In 2020, Dwellworks launched Dwellworks Living to expand our original portfolio of corporate housing markets into a full-service corporate housing operation, offering alternative accommodations for relocation and business travel customers in 125 countries. Our full-service real estate brokerage, Station Cities, supports home rentals, sales, and purchases in the Tri-State New York area and Chicago. Visit our homepage, learn about our services, and read our blogs to learn how we can help with your relocation and business travel needs.  

 

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