Finding your shortest path to a climate job

Aiyana: Who and where are you? What do you do in this world?

Drew: I’m Drew Wilkinson, based here in Seattle, Washington. I am the founder of an organization called the Climate Leadership Collective, where the mission is to make sustainability part of everybody's job. I work top-down with employers to create programs and incentives to help engage employees in their company's sustainability commitments, and then bottom-up with employees directly.

A: What inspired you to get into sustainability and climate? And how did you end up working for Microsoft? 

D: I don't know if there was a single light bulb moment, but I grew up in the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona, and there was this desert area behind our house where all the kids would go play. And one day, we went out there to hang out and the whole area had been bladed over by bulldozers to develop a subdivision. I remember thinking, “Oh, that’s what happens to wild places.” And then, getting older, I realized it's not just happening in my backyard – we’re destroying the planet at an unbelievable scale. 

So, I have called myself an environmentalist since I was a teenager. For a long time I was in the underground punk scene, which is full of activists. And I did a lot of direct action: protests, marches, community organizing. I also worked at a bunch of different environmental nonprofits. In another era, I was on a boat with an organization called Sea Shepherd Conservation Society – I was literally putting myself between poachers and marine wildlife. And then, I ended up at Microsoft.

A: I can imagine that was a shock! How did you start going about integrating climate into your new role?

D: I had just come from a really resource-constrained environment at a tiny nonprofit. And suddenly, I found myself in the headquarters of a trillion-dollar tech company, which at the time had 50,000 employees in more than a hundred buildings. The scale was really, really shocking. And so I pretty quickly saw that there was a major opportunity if you could get your hands on the resources of a giant company to create climate solutions. The question was, “How can I work on climate? How can I take advantage of resources to build solutions?” But I was a paralegal at the time, and the answer I got was, “You can’t.” I was deeply unsatisfied with that answer.

I started networking and found my way to another employee who was thinking the same things. We decided to tackle waste first – there was an enormous amount of waste on campus. It also was low-hanging fruit compared to all the other things a big company could do. We convinced the facilities department to fund a waste audit by a third party, who came up with a list of recommendations for the company to reduce its waste. We distilled that report into a one-pager of actions the company could do tomorrow at no cost, could do in the medium-term for a little bit of money, and then the long-term dream of having our campus be zero waste. We scanned the internal organization chart to figure out who we needed to convince, and basically harassed people in the real estate, facilities, and dining departments until they would agree to meet with us – and they did! They said they’d get back to us. We didn’t hear anything for six months, but then we got an invite to an opening for a recently remodeled cafeteria. It was Microsoft’s first zero-waste cafeteria, and they took as many of our ideas as possible. And this blew our minds – if two random employees with no influence and power could get a company of this size to make a change like this, what would happen if there were thousands of us?

A: That is incredible! That just shows the power of employees doing the groundwork and being persistent. But I know that your efforts grew far beyond just a couple of employees. How did employee-led sustainability evolve after your zero-waste initiative?

D: We started organizing. And what started as a monthly after-work meetup in Seattle morphed into the company’s first global employee sustainability community. It was mostly online but also had a local chapter model so people could get together in person, in their native languages and time zones. In the early years, it was very much about pushing the company from the inside, to say, “You’re not doing enough. Don't take it personally. Nobody's doing enough. But you are a trillion-dollar tech company and not only do you have an opportunity, but you have a responsibility to do a lot more.” And then in 2020, Microsoft made industry-leading sustainability commitments. This changed everything.

A: How did these corporate-level commitments translate on the ground?

D: The resources started flowing. Sustainability went from a nice-to-have to a critical business imperative that got talked about at the highest levels of the company. Thankfully, there was a recognition from Microsoft's leadership that if you're going to transform a company this large this quickly, you literally have to have the entire workforce engaged. There was a 10x increase in the number of full-time sustainability employees, but even with that, they still only represented less than 1% of the entire workforce. That tiny group is not well-positioned to actually make every single part of the company change deep down in the nooks and crannies. That's something that employees are uniquely able to do in a bottom-up way. So, the sustainability community became the primary way that the company engaged its employees.

A: How did you get and keep employees involved? What advice would you give to someone looking to organize a group like this in their own workplace?

D: Through what I call a “virtuous cycle of employee engagement,” where you take employees from climate-curious to full-on climate intrapreneur – where somebody can look at the intersection of sustainability with their current job, take advantage of the company's resources, and collaborate with other employees. Through that cycle, we created this really large, vibrant, thriving employee community. This community created opportunities for everyone to work on sustainability regardless of job title or past experience and laid the groundwork for sustainability to become part of the company culture. It also created a sense of accountability. Companies often make commitments to distant sustainability targets decades in the future. Employees have a unique role to play in holding them accountable along the way and ensuring they are actually following through.

And my advice for anyone looking to do this at their company is: just go, do it immediately. Don't wait or make excuses. There isn't a roadmap for this – that's something you get to figure out with your colleagues, and that's the beauty of community organizing: no one has to figure it out by themselves. You might be the person that helps get it off the ground, but that doesn't mean that you'll always be responsible for it. So, just get the ball rolling. If you build it, they will come! There are climate-concerned people hiding in your workforce, and they're all thinking the same thing, “Oh, it can't be me. I don't wanna start it. I don't have the bandwidth.” So if somebody just goes first, you'll be shocked at how many people come out of the woodwork! Have you seen the video of the dancing guy [at a music festival]? That video does more to explain what I’m talking about than anything I can say.

A: You now have your own consulting business. Can you talk a bit more about this new chapter and what you learned at Microsoft that you’ve brought into your current work?

D: I now work with all kinds of companies to make sustainability part of everybody’s job. I work with employers to create top-down programming to engage the entire workforce in sustainability, and with employees to create bottom-up initiatives. I try to offer as many of my services as possible freely to as many employees as possible. All of this happened – my entire career changed – because I [organized Microsoft’s first global employee sustainability group]. Nobody asked me to do it. In fact, over the years, many people told me not to do it. But now, I literally run my own sustainability consulting business on how to do this. 

I think the biggest barrier I saw at Microsoft, and that I see currently in other companies, is a very old-fashioned idea of who gets to work on sustainability – it's very academic, it's very “ivory tower.” It's this idea that it’s only the sustainability professionals who should be allowed to touch this. But how can sustainability teams – a chronically under-resourced group of people – change an entire company without getting everybody else on board? So, ultimately, it’s about transforming sustainability away from just an operational thing that one team is responsible for and turning it into a cultural value that every employee feels responsible for and empowered to contribute to.  So if I'm successful in sustainability, then it would become a cultural value [for companies] instead of an operational task. 

A: You’ve worked both inside of and with major companies on engaging employees on climate, and so at this point are a real expert on the topic. What are some key trends and takeaways you want to highlight for the folks reading this?

D: I think we're at this interesting moment at a macroeconomic level right now, where there are hundreds of thousands of people who are deeply concerned about climate change and now understand that they have an opportunity to make a real impact through their jobs and their labor. It's not just you as a consumer, you as a voter – it's also you as an employee. Withholding our labor – choosing who we will and won't work for – that is power in a capitalist system, and we should be exercising it for climate.

So, a lot of people are trying to make the pivot into climate jobs. But the not-so-good news is that the demand far outstrips the supply. But within that is an opportunity. If every job is a climate job, then that is an invitation to every single one of us to look at our careers, our jobs, our roles, our disciplines, and figure out how to make them more sustainable, not just for us as individuals, but for every other person in the world who also has that job. You don't need to quit the job you have and go get a full-time sustainability job. The shortest path to a climate job is the one you already have. 

For more, check out the below video from Microsoft about Drew's climate leadership in the workplace: