Gen Z workers driving trend of ‘climate quitting’, research shows

One in three young people have turned down a job offer because the employer’s environmental, social and governance ESG commitments were not in line with their own values. So what are employers doing about it? We’ll consider that. 

This is new research by KPMG and shows ESG factors are influencing the employment decisions of almost half of UK office workers, with millennials and younger workers driving the growing trend of ‘climate quitting’ – leaving your current job for one that is more environmentally friendly.

KPMG asked around 6,000 UK adult office workers, students, apprentices and those who have left higher education in the past six months about their attitudes to work. 46% said they want their employer to demonstrate a commitment to ESG; 20% said they have turned down a job offer when the company’s ESG commitments were not in line with their personal values.

Those aged 25-34 are the most likely (55%) to value ESG commitments from their employer, but 18-24 years olds (51%) and 35-44 years old (48%) are not far behind.

Personnel Today covers this and quotes John McCalla-Leacy, head of ESG at KPMG. He says: ‘For businesses the direction of travel is clear. By 2025, 75% of the working population will be millennials, meaning they will need to have credible plans to address ESG if they want to continue to attract and retain this growing pool of talent.’

So, let’s get reaction to this research. David Bryden has been working with a number of clients in this area and earlier he joined me by video-link from Edinburgh to discuss this. I started by asking David about the advice he’s giving clients right now:   

David Bryden: “The advice for our clients is start small, you've got lots of room to build up. There are all sorts of changes that can be made to, sometimes, quite old policies, you can choose to incentivize different behaviours on the part of your staff, for example, look into your travel policies - do you incentivize trains, not planes? Look into your expenses policies - do you make it easier for people to claim expenses for different ways of travel? Do you provide car policies that allow people to get an electric vehicle cheaply and easily from salary sacrifice schemes? There's a whole range of things you can do to make it a bit easier and a bit more of an incentive for staff to travel in a green manner. Other policies you can look at include the way in which you run your shifts, for example, because having people on split ship patterns can be tremendously carbon intensive, and they have to travel to and from work on a regular basis, unnecessarily sometimes. How did you power your factories? Have you looked into solar panels, that sort of stuff? 
That's all the bigger picture end of things but, from an HR perspective, look at what you incentivize people to do, how you can help them do green things better and just think about the way in which you make people work in the office at home, at home, how you expect them to get around. These are all things that HR can do just to look a little bit greener.”

Joe Glavina: “Obviously, there are three parts to ESG, David. Is there any one of them taking priority?” 

David Bryden: “Here at Pinsent Masons the S is a big deal in particular. We have a huge diversity and inclusion practice which can help with almost anything you need to do from the social perspective of ESG. We can run audits on your workforce, we can look into your gender pay gap, ethnic reporting, anything you'd need to do, we have people who can do it. From an environmental side of things, we're advising clients to talk to trade unions and make sure that the groundwork is there for future policy changes, ways in which you're going to have to work with trade unions in the future as you move your business towards a greener practice. Many of our clients are working with recognition agreements with their trade unions that date from the 1970s, 1980s and they’re not really designed for some of the new issues that are coming across and we're advising clients that it's time to get trade unions on board. This isn't yet, to the best of our knowledge, at the top of the agenda for many trade unions but, as this article shows, young people, Millennials, are all caring about ESG and that is only going to become a bigger issue. Trade unions wants new members, they want to increase their membership across all age spectrums, and they're having a particularly difficult time at the moment recruiting young workers so they're going to get ESG and this is going to become a major issue, front and centre, for TUs in the next 10 years. You want to start the conversation with them now and get them on board.”

Joe Glavina: “Final question, David. Most of the headlines tend to be around what the energy sector is doing but, presumably, this is an issue that affects every sector of business.”

David Bryden: “Absolutely. Energy companies are the most obvious target for the press on this and you might have noticed that the board of directors of Shell are being sued individually by ‘Client Earth’, an activist organisation in the Netherlands, for failure to meet their climate targets. So, there's all these big stories about energy companies out there, but any organisation can do very small things to make the business much more ESG-friendly and more attractive to new workers. For example, transport is an obvious answer. 
There's lots of things you can do to make your busses, your trains, whatever structure you're working with, greener. Other changes which are slightly less obvious include, as we've discussed earlier, changing shift patterns, the way people work in the office – it can change your energy consumption and it can change the energy profile of your business. Other little things include making sure the lights are off in the building, turning off your computers at night – small things that make a big impact to, not just your ESG targets, but your energy bills which, at the moment, is a major issue as well. Every industry can do something to lower its carbon footprint and lower its environmental impact and it's just a matter of looking for the little things that a company can do to have this change happen for them.”

David and the team has put together a detailed analysis piece which deals with the role HR professionals can play in shaping and delivering their organisations’ ESG strategy, and helping address the skills gap in the process. That’s ‘How HR can shape and deliver the ESG agenda’ – that is currently available from the Out-Law website and we’ve put a link to it in the transcript of this programme.

LINKS
- Link to Out-Law article: ‘How HR can shape and deliver the ESG agenda’