Climate Club's software platform is helping companies and employees meet ESG goals

Employees want to work for companies that care for the health of the environment as much as the health of their own employees. But taking measurable steps to "go green" can leave employers scratching their heads, and anything less can look like a lot of talk and no action. 

Climate Club is hoping to help organizations bridge that gap. The new sustainability platform partners with companies to create a dashboard both employees and employers can interact with, tracking their current carbon emission levels and providing both parties with resources to help meet sustainability goals.

"[When we started], the big question was: what can we do as individuals to contribute towards reversing climate change?" says Adam Braun, CEO of Climate Club. "We started to really observe that, not only were individuals asking this question, but companies were also stepping up to contribute toward goals across the sustainability and climate spectrum." 

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An increasing number of organizations have realized that investing in environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals is one way to build long-term workforces. According to a recent IBM survey of CEOs, sustainability topped the list of pressing issues that organizations expect to contend with in the next two to three years. And on the employee side of business, 96% of office workers who feel that their employer is ahead of others in sustainable practices would recommend their workplace to others, according to Climate Club. Which will only become more important in the years ahead, as 77% of Gen Z employees want to work for an employer that's aligned with their values. 

"We saw this intersection where companies were making big aspirational commitments to sustainability, and simultaneously the workforce was looking for ways to be a part of leading companies on climate sustainability," Braun says. "It seemed like there was an opportunity to build a product that could ultimately serve both needs." 

Climate Club's software aims to embed sustainability into a company's practices. For individual employees, a personalized dashboard of their unique carbon footprint can be accessed, alongside the company's total impact. Recommendations — both large and small, and at the employer and organizational levels — are then provided to help enact change. That can include suggestions around business travel and high-emission commutes, to more granular suggestions on managing hybrid workspaces and individual employee habits. 

"For sustainability to be successful, it has to be embedded into the core business units themselves," Braun says. "It needs to be done in a way that helps every single person across a large enterprise understand what their unique goals are, how they can contribute towards those goals, and then how they're attracting clear performance benchmarks both internally and externally."

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Employees can input their own habits and tendencies into the Climate Club dashboard, and choose how intensive of an emissions review they'd like to participate in. From there, Climate Club will calculate their contributions, and help an employee understand how their habits factor into the organization's total contributions as well as reduction goals.

Despite Climate Club's recent market entry, the company is already being piloted by organizations including Bain and Meta, and has attracted $6.5million in seed funding by XYZ ventures and Vestigo Ventures. 

"Climate Club feels like the merger of all of these different trends and influences that we're seeing around employee engagement and net carbon targets that the Fortune 500 companies were coming out with," says Kelly Shaw, an investor with Vestigo Ventures. 

It's a signal that the broad understanding of sustainability has shifted to a multi-pronged approach, one that will require the buy-in and support of all levels of a business. 

"Companies engaging with Climate Club can connect small individual actions to collective impact," Braun says. "There's oftentimes this belief that it's only the senior most leader that can come up with an idea that has resounding positive impacts on the future success of that business. But I think we've all seen that, oftentimes, the best ideas can come from the most unexpected places."