Embracing Corporate Responsibility for a Better Future

In two weeks, I’ll take the stage at the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) World Conference in Chicago to discuss the importance of contextualizing and communicating corporate sustainability efforts and results. I am thrilled to share the stage with a panel of experts, including one of our customers, Vail Resorts and their Director of Sustainability, Fritz Bratschie.

As Chief Legal, Administrative & Sustainability Officer at Extreme – part of my remit is to develop sustainability strategies and programs that help us reduce our environmental impact and promote social responsibility, without sacrificing business results. Sustainability efforts are a marathon, not a sprint.  Each innovation provides another opportunity to refine our operations, maintain a competitive edge, and foster resilience in a rapidly changing global landscape. We collaborate with partners and end customers (like Vail Resorts) to establish best practices across many areas such as sourcing, operations, product development and compliance.

I’m proud of the work we’ve done at Extreme to make the world a better place and have a positive impact in the communities we serve. In 2020, we established a Corporate Responsibility Council, with oversight from the Board of Directors.  Our Corporate Responsibility Council is tasked with overseeing three key pillars: people (including Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and philanthropy), governance, which encompasses data privacy and ethics and the environment. Some of our environmental goals include developing sustainable products, reducing our corporate carbon footprint and minimizing other environment impacts. Our team of leaders drives a variety of initiatives and are responsible for developing best practices while tracking progress.

Some of the progress we’ve made to date includes:

• Reducing scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 12% by synthesizing our real estate footprint and consolidating and optimizing our data centers.  This work, and other initiatives is ongoing.  Our long-term goal is to reduce our carbon footprint by 50% by 2030;
• Partnering with our Supply Chain partners to establish aggressive scope 3 emissions reduction goals and implement circular design principles into our product development process.  An example of this is increasing the use of more recycled and recyclable material in Extreme’s products;
• Establishing a baseline for responsible resource consumption, including water and waste. A step we have taken towards this goal is developing a recycling program that holistically impacts waste reduction in our operations; including how we manage products at their end-of-use phase;
• Achieving SOC 2 (System and Organizational Controls) compliance, attesting that our cloud solutions service safeguards customer data and provides services in a secure and reliable way;
• Investing in our communities. We recently completed our 4^th Annual Day of Giving, during which employees participated in over 300 hours of volunteer work and charitable contributions totaling more than $128,000 for organizations like Susan G. Komen, Kroger Zero Hunger Zero Waste, Special Olympics, and the Korean Red Cross, among many others.
• Additionally, we enhanced our employee benefits package to include volunteer time off (VTO) for each employee.

This is not an exhaustive list of all the efforts Extreme is supporting from a corporate responsibility standpoint – but a great indicator of how we are playing a significant role in this movement. It is our collective responsibility to make the world a better place, which is why this all-hands-on-deck effort is so deeply embedded in our corporate culture.

I look forward to sharing more of my experiences, successes, and best practices at the IABC World Conference on June 25.