Taking the Initiative with Hurd, Mike Fenna, Chief Technology Officer Hurd

Could you kindly introduce yourself?

I’m Mike and I’m the Chief Technology Officer at Kite Insights. Kite Insights has been going for over 10 years and we have a strong background in sustainability and other important ethical issues. We conduct research, thought leadership and curation of events. We also run the Climate School, which we sell to corporate companies to help them train their staff on how they can take climate action in their roles – regardless of where they sit in the company. Hurd is the new product that we’ve recently launched to support Kite’s mission.

What exactly is Hurd?

Hurd is a free app designed to make climate action easy at work. It empowers people to demand more and do more on climate in their workplace. At the moment, there’s plenty of places people can go where they can calculate their own carbon footprint or they can find out how they can make changes in their lives to help with climate change, but there’s a lot less out there – very little, in fact – which helps people to tackle climate change at work. What we actually tend to find is that the impact that one person can have in their job, especially within larger companies, can be much bigger than the impact of whatever they can change in their personal lives. This is why we’ve developed Hurd; to really help people realise that every job is a climate job. You don’t have to work in a sustainability team or anything like that to take climate action. There are small changes that everyone can make – regardless of industry and role – which can have a truly meaningful impact.

How accessible is Hurd and how does it work?

Hurd is a free app first and foremost. Anyone can download it, or they can come to our website. It’s designed to help make climate action at work easy. I often describe the first part of Hurd as ‘Glassdoor for climate’ – you can share your views and suggestions on your company’s climate action (or lack thereof) anonymously. We send emails and push notifications to everyone who signs up to Hurd, which remind them to answer three questions. It takes less than a minute to answer three questions and the questions are designed to be answerable by anyone. There are 44 questions in total – and you don’t need lots of sustainability or climate knowledge to answer them. We’ve set the questions up simply to understand what that person’s ability to act on climate is within their job. This is one half of what Hurd does.

What’s the other half of what Hurd does?

The other half of Hurd is all about learning. There are two aspects to this. Firstly, success stories; employees can share when they’ve taken successful climate action in their jobs, and then anyone can read and be inspired by these stories. People from companies all around the world are using Hurd, including GO employees, to share their experiences.

The other learning aspect is actual lessons. We’ve designed the first section of lessons to help people figure out where to start, and to give them an idea about what their company’s already doing. We’ve designed the second section around specific job roles and departments. These micro-learning courses are very pragmatic and focused on what people in those roles can actually do to take climate action in their jobs. These lessons can take anywhere from three to six minutes each, so really it doesn’t take a lot of effort and time to start learning how to take climate action in your current role.

How can the company benefit from Hurd?

Companies can access the overall scores in the app, but they can also break them down further, giving them the ability to start filtering by departments, country, gender etc. The company can also see trends as well. What’s more, the company can view feedback and respond publicly to comments that people have left. All of this enables senior management to take action, from addressing employee concerns via the app to implementing initiatives that target the specific pain points revealed by our data.

Our GO Green Initiative

At GO plc, we’re not just a telecommunications company, we’re a group of people who connect people all over Malta and Gozo. We strive to maintain this connectivity, not just digitally, but also physically. It’s important that we take care of our physical environment so that future generations can also enjoy the same connectivity. That’s why we’ve set up GO Green, an extension of GO primarily focusing on helping sustain and improve the environment whenever possible.

This blog post was written by Benjamin Thomas Scerri – Sustainability Associate, GO Green.

Benjamin is a member of the GO Green team. His main focus is keeping track of new ways in which to make GO more sustainable wherever and whenever possible.