2023-09-23 00:33:29
Human resources departments know that to attract the best people, money is not always everything and that they will surely have to use the so-called emotional salary to reinforce their offer. They will have to use incentives – from daycare or dining services to health insurance or training – that are not included in the remuneration, but which can lead workers to reject more economically lucrative proposals. A not inconsiderable circumstance when you cannot compete for salary or professional profiles are required that are as difficult to find as they are to retain. And one of the incentives that is attracting more and more interest is sustainability. “There are workers who like to be in companies that share their values, so, if the firm has programs that disseminate them and metrics that demonstrate it, it can achieve a point in favor of the preferences of someone they want to hire,” explains Nerea Mendinueta, founding partner of The Good Goal, a startup dedicated to facilitating the incorporation of environmentally responsible habits in companies.
The Goog Goal
Firm that, through a digital platform and gamification techniques, helps companies implement sustainability.
Their starting idea was actually to create an ‘app’ for private use, which would help anyone to measure the positive impact on the environment that they could achieve by considering small changes and to encourage themselves to make their habits more and more sustainable. «However, over time we saw that our proposal made more sense for companies. It could serve to identify the needs of the organization in a transition towards sustainability that the climate emergency and the 2030 Agenda are going to impose, requiring complex changes in both the business model and processes. These changes will be more bearable if there is already prior awareness among all the people in the organization,” explains Mendinueta.
In other words, resisting what will soon be an obligation is a worse strategy than building a good reputation, and that possibility of adding value to the company is what led Mendinueta and his partner, Nadia de la Fuente, last year , to modify its initial project and offer its services to corporate clients through a digital platform.
What they did not change from that first approach is that “the agents of change have to be the people with their particular actions” and the tool used to get them hooked: gamification. The Good Goal turns the implementation of these responsible behaviors into challenges or competitions that motivate employees, either individually or in teams, to continue improving little by little. Thus, if the challenge is, for example, to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by a certain percentage, the system will say each day how much CO2 they have saved into the atmosphere by walking to work or by turning off the computer during work. lunch. «The challenges can be specific, such as participation in a volunteer program, or sustained over time, such as achieving zero emissions. There are times when the company already has a defined objective, but in any case we advise them to ensure that we are proposing something achievable,” he clarifies.
Rewards
Companies can offer incentives to workers with the most sustainable habits
Points and incentives
The data that measures the fulfillment of the challenges – to which the platform gives access in real time through a control panel – is converted into points, and the points into rankings and small victories that can have rewards beyond mere personal satisfaction. «The ideal is to ensure that the worker takes these good habits home, fully integrating them into his life outside of work as well, but the truth is that incentives work very well. Companies that opt for them can offer whatever they want, but obviously we ask them to be consistent with the final purpose of the tool, from an electric scooter to a stay in an eco-hotel to a dinner in a vegan restaurant or even a day free,” says Mendinueta.
The company, which expects to invoice 50,000 euros this year and has a financing round of 200,000 open, is currently working on automating the configuration of the challenges “so that companies can implement them in two clicks.” “That would give us scalability, although we also want to introduce artificial intelligence and we are considering other lines of business such as online training in sustainability,” explains its co-founder. The Good Goal will be present on October 17 and 18 at B-Venture, the startup event organized by EL CORREO that this year celebrates its eighth edition with the sponsorship of the Department of Economic Development, Sustainability and Environment of the Basque Government , the development agency SPRI, the Provincial Council of Bizkaia and the Bilbao City Council, as well as with the collaboration of BStartup of Banco Sabadell, BBVA Spark, BBK, Laboral Kutxa, CaixaBank and the University of Deusto.
Control of the veracity of the information
The information that The Good Goal quantifies about the implementation of more environmentally responsible habits within the organization can be used by the company to prepare sustainability reports. Hence, the startup team has had to establish controls that prevent some companies from being tempted to use their tool as an instrument to whiten their image. «We believe that the risk is small because it is the workers who, individually, provide that information. In any case, it is true that the fact that we have controls over the veracity of the data is one of the things that the employees themselves value most,” clarifies Nerea Mendinueta.
This control will be exercised by requesting periodic evidence, such as attaching photographs that support information. «When an employee has demonstrated that he is meeting the challenges, he is named a ‘verified user’ and, from there, proof continues to be requested, but only in a random way. It’s not about being the sustainability police either, it would generate rejection,” says its co-founder.
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