Making footprints to reduce our own footprint impact

By Don Brennan, Hughes Insurance

With what’s going on the world these days, things can often seem a little overwhelming.

In March this year we took the decision as a business to put our people first and almost overnight set up a virtual working environment for over 250 people to work remotely from home.

The logistics around this were obviously fairly challenging – but given the challenges we all face, it was the least we could do to support our team. Today over 99% of our staff work remotely – and we will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

If I’m honest myself and my colleagues on the Executive Team at Hughes planned for, and anticipated, more challenges from our new normal – but our team, and people in general, are very resilient. I can say that because what we have all had to adapt to in recent times would have been unimaginable only months ago. Even with the responsibility of managing our business through the challenges of Covid-19 we have endeavoured to keep our business as normal as possible for our customers and have scaled up our staff levels to accommodate a higher volume of calls and enquiries into our now virtual call centre.

Central to our strategy is our commitment to being a responsible business. How we support our people is one way of looking at this, but frankly it is not enough to simply look after our own interests – we believe we need to do more.

With everything that’s going on in the world these days, one of the biggest long term issues we are all faced with is climate change – yet it often takes a back seat to apparently more pressing news agenda items. I work in insurance, as do my colleagues and peers – but that does not absolve us of responsibility. We all have to do our bit. At home we do our best, from recycling to reducing our plastic usage, but as a business we can make a much bigger impact if we commit to action.

Earlier this year we launched a partnership with Woodland Trust NI. Their role is to stand up for trees, protect our woods and increase woodland cover locally for the benefit of people, wildlife and climate. According to Ian McCurley, the Chief Executive of Woodland Trust NI, Northern Ireland is one of the least-wooded regions in Europe, with just 8% woodland cover compared with the European average of 37%.

Only 8%, I find that staggering. Especially when you consider that trees filter out carbon dioxide and pump out oxygen to take its place. Basically they help cancel out some of our bad behaviours, and they’re the most generous things we’ve got. Not only do they absorb atmospheric carbon – they lock it up for centuries, too. Or to put it as Ian puts it: ‘trees are the lungs of our planet’.

Our initiative with Woodland Trust NI is quite simple. We are encouraging our customers to switch from paper correspondence to online correspondence. For every customer that switches to e-mail based communications we will donate £2 to Woodland Trust NI. As one of Northern Ireland’s largest insurance brokers, we have targeted 80% of our customers to switch by 2022, which means together with Woodland Trust NI we plan to plant thousands of trees throughout Northern Ireland. This will help offset our carbon footprint by reducing the huge amounts of printed materials we create that often go unread.

And so far it’s working. Since January we have managed to convert over 13,000 customers to paperless communications. Simply put, that’s less paper and more trees. We want to help Woodland Trust NI plant these trees too – but sadly, given the current environment we are all operating in, we haven’t yet had the opportunity to get our team into their wellies – and get them out there, making footprints and planting indigenous trees from Northern Ireland, all in the name of reducing our environmental footprint.

We sincerely hope that will change in 2021 – in the meantime, we will keep doing our bit, because every customer who switches is not only worth £2 to the Woodland Trust, they are worth so much more as the trees we plant now will support the environment for generations to come.

For information on Hughes Insurance, visit www.hughesinsurance.info/paperless or www.woodlandtrust.org.uk

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