Sustainability report 2021 | Our efforts towards more sustainability in our company
The Sustainability Report is the annual sustainability logbook of the Peerigon Sustainability Passion Group. Every year, we collect and evaluate company-related data on the topic of sustainability. In this report, we would like to show a few facets of our efforts toward more corporate social responsibility. Despite the pandemic, some good managed to come out of Peerigon this year. We start with our three personal success stories. Social media highlights, climate report and a brief overview of our most important facts and figures are also worth taking a look at. And last but not least, we want to show examples of the projects in which Peeris invested their time in 2021 when they were not working on customer projects.
Decision making in teams | Konsens, our online voting tool
Birthday outing, donation projects, the focus of our company goals – all topics on which Peeris decide on together, as a team. Before 2021, we usually voted by show of (virtual) hands. But we knew we could do better, fairer voting. That's why we explored different voting systems and developed the app Konsens as a result. It supports ranked choice and positional voting in addition to a simple majority vote. Now the process of creating polls and making decisions becomes more transparent while individual votes remain anonymous. We developed the app in our 20% Peerigon time, hosted it in Germany and made it available to everyone to try. Half a year later, we were proud to announce that Konsens made it onto the shortlist of Germany’s first Corporate Digital Responsibility award.
Stoßlüften | Fresh air, the German way
If excellent air quality is your goal, you will find that spinning heads, small meeting rooms, and pandemics are not ideal preconditions. Putting up with heated meetings and complicated bugs, it's easy to forget to open the window from time to time. But while we are coding, fresh air helps us immensely to keep a clear head. We decided to put a CO2e sensor in every room in order to make the problem visible to everyone in the office. When the sensor hits the limit, it's time for good old "Stoßlüften". In addition, we have installed air purifiers with HEPA filters in every room which ensure that the air remains even cleaner. A good idea, we think – even beyond Covid times.
Keeping in Touch | Hanging out Together
Spending time with our colleagues and being part of a team are important reasons why we come to work. However, social distancing and (partial) office closure made regular interaction within our team more difficult. How could we still create space for interaction? We tapped into the collective team intelligence, found a good list of ideas and established two different formats: Team Lunch and Social Matching. Eating is inherently social, so once a week everyone had the chance to order takeout, and have a company-paid lunch together. No matter if you joined live at the office or attended the lunch remotely – you got to hang out a little. For Social Matching, a bot would randomly match up pairs of Peeris to meet each week. We used 190 hours of working time for Social Matching, having coffees, doing sports outside, or enjoying walks together.
2021 bereits zum 3. Mal beim Augsburger Firmenlauf 🏃
Our report in facts and figures
In this part, we document numbers and facts. Each plays a vital role in our efforts for more sustainability and social responsibility in our company. We look at parameters such as carbon emissions and energy consumption, resources and our future direction.
🚧 The analysis is still in progress. We will add it as soon as we have all the data on the basis of which, for example, our energy consumption from last year can be analyzed. 🚧
We are carbon neutral*
Since 2019 we balanced our entire CO₂ consumption - from energy and heating to office supplies and business travel. This resulted in a footprint of 23,532 kg CO₂ for 2020, which we have had verified by Climate Partner. Together with a safety margin of 10%, we offset our corporate carbon footprint via the Kasigau Wildlife Corridor forest protection project in Kenya. We are pleased to be one of the first climate-neutral IT service providers in Bavaria and hope to further reduce our emissions in the following years.
* As the term climate neutral has been under criticism, ClimatePartner has changed its label since 2023: Companies with a financial climate contribution is the appropriate term.
City biking for the climate
Peeribot
Hey, I'm Peeribot (the gift for every employee who reached the next promotion level). If I'm not out celebrating the achievements of the Peeris I'm an eager supporter of Lüften (cross ventilation) in the office.
Personnel and community engagement
What do our employees actually do when they're not working on customer projects? Making coffee? That is all well and good, but much more important to us are the hours we devote to sharing knowledge internally or introducing newbies to the world of the WWW. That's work, too. And on top of that, the weekly sports activities – whether it's swimming, horseback riding, running or welly throwing.
At least 11 sports disciplines
🏆 Our top sporty spices:
💪 Tanner, Irena, Bene, Paul, Judith
Fitness
Each peer can track 1/40 of his or her working time on sports. So we did! Besides classic sports like running, cycling (or gravel biking), yoga, or going to the gym, our colleagues also participated in gettowork-outs, longboard rides, and brainstorming sessions. (We can well imagine that the latter can make you sweat).
14 Nodeschools
📍 Nairobi
📍 Augsburg
👩💻 5 Girls for Girls'Day
✍️ 8 Blog Posts & Talks
Community Work
Knowledge sharing is caring. The Nodeschool is a low-level offer for everyone who wants to get to know Node.js and its ecosystem. With our colleague Antony setting up 10 events in Nairobi alone (!), we hosted a total of 14 remote Nodeschools from both Augsburg and Nairobi last year. At Girls'Day 2021, we once again showed 5 girls what it is like to work as a web developer. This year's special focus was media literacy. With a quiz and talks in small breakout rooms, we tried to raise interest and make everyone feel welcome. In addition to oral knowledge transfer, we also shared some insights in writing: our colleague Moritz brought our knowledge about rem, em, px, vh and consorts up to speed with his blog post series about CSS units. If you have ever wondered how many px make a centimeter (or inch) see part 1.
🕚 > 400 hours
Implementation of the new salary model
When Peerigon was founded, and for a long time after that, the founders decided on an everyone-earns-the-same salary model. Back then, all Peerigon employees had roughly the same life situation. With a growing company, families, and other life plans in the mix, the team developed a new compensation model in 2020 & 2021, including a more differentiated evaluation process to go with it.
Sustainability is a team effort.
Sustainability needs binding rules, clear structures, and a sense of responsibility for each individual. In our day-to-day work, we ensure that our activities fit in with our philosophy and core business. But we are aware that this is only the beginning. Small gestures are not enough. And acting responsibly cannot be done alone. Making our working world more sustainable is a task that affects our entire frame of reference. With your help, we can take the first steps to make a difference.
Get in touch.
Perhaps you missed one or two items of information when reading our company report. Or maybe you have any praise, ideas or suggestions on how we can improve the report in the future? We are looking forward to hearing from you!