The second birthday of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) unit of Trialog is approaching! This is an ideal occasion to reflect on the activities of the past two years.
The CSR actions are important as a complement to our company’s activities, to ensure they are coherent. Furthermore, through electrical mobility, smart grids and health and social activities, we consider our company to be an agent for energy transition. Therefore, we aspire to ensure that our company values and internal and external activities are aligned.
2020 and 2021 were years for evaluation and reflection and resulted in the creation of roots for the CSR works at Trialog. This included a review of our electricity consumption, carbon footprint and gender equality index. These initial baseline reviews were essential to facilitate an understanding of the status of the CSR at Trialog and for the selection of the most important and meaningful actions so the company could progress. Throughout these two years, these background evaluations were accompanied by several concrete actions, such as the improvement of the recycling process. This included the installation of recycling bins in strategic locations to ensure that waste is disposed of in a manner that is accepted by recycling centres and that a specific recycling process for electronics is created. Well-being activities and actions to facilitate teleworking were also implemented, particularly during Covid times.
An evaluation of our electricity consumption
A Trilab project conducted in 2020 allowed for the real-time tracking of our electricity consumption. Using our expertise in electricity monitoring and IoT, a Trilab demo was created (by Martin Litré). This demo used LoRaWAN devices that were connected to three Linky smart meters to collect data on our energy consumption and display it in real-time through an online interface and a small RaspberryPi device.
This enabled us to identify our most electricity-intensive devices and adopt improved habits. Since we are currently replacing our lights with less energy-intensive ones, we look forward to viewing the electricity consumption results!
The carbon footprint of Trialog
The carbon footprint of Trialog was calculated for the years 2019 and 2020. To do so, we used the GoodPlanet calculator, which includes a tool dedicated to companies. This assessment allowed us to learn about the main sources of CO2 emissions from Trialog’s activities and, therefore, optimise the planning for the CSR team’s actions to minimise these emissions.
The diagram above shows that on a normal operation basis (2019), the main sources of emissions are local flights (within Europe) and the computer park. This makes sense with respect to Trialog’s activities: Innovation projects, such as European projects require frequent travel and, as a computer science company, we have an extensive computer park.
Additionally, figure 1 illustrates the large impact of Covid on Trialog’s emissions, i.e., from 102.45 tCo2 in 2019 to 65.57 tCo2 in 2020. This was due to a large reduction in travel, particularly regarding local flights. This demonstrates that the lessons learned from the Covid crisis concerning improved remote communication and cooperation could greatly impact our carbon footprint – this is the next challenge for the CSR team.
Gender equality index
The CSR team calculated the 2020 index on gender equality at Trialog. This calculation facilitates a depiction of gender disparities in the workplace in an objective and unbiased manner. This is extremely important to ensure that adequate means are being deployed to avoid these disparities.
The gender equality index is based on the Egapro index, which was developed by the French government for companies with greater than 50 employees. Our company has fewer than 50 employees, thus, several inconsistencies may arise; however, the index still provides a good picture of our status and facilitates comparison with other companies. The index is based on three criteria:
- Salary gaps
- Disparities in salary rises
- Representation in the best-paid jobs
The calculated index for the company for 2020 reached 94%. Compared to the national index of 85%, we are quite proud of ourselves! However, in terms of gender equality, a result of 100% is always expected. The 6% margin for improvement concerns the third criterion. This is mostly due to large disparities in the computer sciences academic studies, resulting in fewer recruitments of women than men. However, this is improving on a global level, and we intend to encourage greater representation of women in science by enhancing women’s access to computer science studies through internships and work-study contracts.
If you would like to learn more about Trialog’s activities, please see our website: https://www.trialog.com/en/home/
Let’s begin 2022 with good intentions, concrete actions and forward progress for Trialog’s CSR!
