We make SMEs fit for the future, also on the sustainability front.
In our corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, we focus on those areas of action in which our business model is particularly effective and efficient in creating additional ecological and social benefits. As an IT service provider, we support our customers in meeting their objectives not only for digitalisation, but also with regard to sustainability.
Our solutions provide a contemporary response to current economic, ecological and social challenges.
Our solutions
Digitalisation:
Digital technologies have fundamentally changed customer behaviour and the world of work. Accelerating the digitalisation of business models and business processes is one key challenge faced by companies in all sectors. We accompany our customers on this course.
Climate change and growing scarcity of resources:
Digitalisation is a lever that enables companies to make more sparing and effective use of resources in production, reduce consumption and cut CO2 emissions. Together with our customers, we are working towards digitalised, resource-efficient and CO2-neutral production or avoiding waste in the retail sector by digitally monitoring best before dates. These digital technologies are also used on an ecologically sustainable basis. At our energy-intensive high-performance data centres, we are virtualising infrastructures and applications, using efficient climate control technology and procuring all the electricity we use from renewable energies.
Cybercrime:
As a digitaliser, we have a particularly great responsibility to ensure data protection. Reliably protecting data with our extensive cybersecurity services and securing the infrastructures and systems we deploy are among our core competencies. These actions form the foundation for building customer relationships based on trust.
We see CSR as an investment in our own future and a means to secure our business resilience. Our sustainability strategy therefore forms an integral component of our corporate strategy, our “2020plus” growth strategy and the core of our brand. In the years ahead, we will uphold this proven strategy under the title of “beyond 2022”.
Jürgen Hermann, CEO of q.beyondMateriality
Sustainability makes key contributions to our business resilience. We see “business resilience” as the ability to withstand external crises and disruptions in social, economic, environmental or political conditions (resistance), adapt to new conditions (adaptability) and thus maintain our stability despite external impacts.
Here, the following topics are at the forefront: Sustainable growth, robust core processes, satisfied and innovative employees, consistent customer focus and a portfolio that reacts rapidly enough to economic, ecological and social developments.
Our sustainability objectives
- We intend to achieve climate neutrality by 2025. - Based on our 2019 CO2 balance sheet, we aim to reduce our emissions from electricity, fuels and business travel by a total of at least 40%, offset the remaining emissions and also offset all material emissions sources along the value chain through to delivery to the customer.
- Increase customers’ willingness to recommend us - We aim to further boost the loyalty of our customers in the years ahead. - By 2024, customer satisfaction as measured in the net promoter score (NPS) should rise to +20%.
- Increase employees‘ willingness to recommend us - We had set ourselves the goal of implementing a control process in 2021 to determine how willing our employees are to recommend q.beyond as an employer, and that just as systematically as we monitor the loyalty of our customers. We have now established this control process, with monthly measurement of the employee net promoter score (NPS), and have since referred to this as a performance indicator for the measures we take to increase employee satisfaction.
- Expanding our sustainability-promoting portfolio - We aimed to include at least two new or additional digital sustainability solutions in our portfolio in 2021 and to test their application at customers. By including the new portfolio elements of “weak point scan” and “permanent cybersecurity monitoring” in the field of cybercrime prevention, we met this objective. Moreover, we added services in the field of hyper automation in order to reduce the resources used. In future, we aim to consistently further increase the share of digital sustainability solutions in our portfolio.
