In 2022, Visma has set a greater focus on sustainability. We see both the responsibilities we have, and potential for us to improve further. Visma’s profile continues to grow, and we’re happy to include more ESG software into our portfolio. With more than one million customers, we set out potential for real impact, and we look optimistically towards our future.
We approach sustainability both as a bottom-up engagement, and a top-down prioritisation. We’ve set up a scalable model to enable sustainability work to thrive both in individual companies, and in the Visma group as a whole. By building bottom up, our companies can focus on what’s most important for them, while being able to rely on Visma for prioritisation, guidance, and compliance for topics such as ISO standards and reporting.
In 2022, we made great progress both in our commitment to our sustainability work, and in milestones reached. We became a proud participant of the UN Global Compact, where we take a principles-based approach to responsible business. To work efficiently, and to enable a constant information flow top-down, and button-up, we established a new Sustainability Governance structure. Through established Sustainability Lead roles at the country/region-level, and a decision making organ, the Sustainability board, we are strengthening the collaboration between our companies across different geographies.
Furthermore, based on the carbon emission data collected for 2021, IT hardware was one of the biggest sources of emissions for Visma. In 2022, we’ve further assessed the impact our hardware has, and looked at how we could lengthen the lifespan of our hardware to reduce the environmental impacts. We also introduced a new hardware procurement and recycling partner to help us achieve more control of the hardware lifecycle.
We also set a new focus on how we can have a positive impact on the environment by providing our customers with solutions that help them be more sustainable, our acquisition of SmartTrackers (a sustainability management software) as an example. Looking to our employees, we launched our very first Diversity & Inclusion strategy, moving us closer to our goal to be the most inspiring and engaging place to work. Finally, we’d like to highlight that Visma also positions itself in the top 10% in the IT industry based on our employee engagement score (eNPS) that stood at 61 at year’s end.
Looking into the future, we’ll only be strengthening our sustainability efforts. We see that our sustainability governance will be strengthened and evolve, as sustainability reporting is moving towards being equal to financial reporting in the future. We also see the amount of companies and people we can affect and positively impact via our products in a sustainable way, and to help guide our customers to become more sustainable. The future is sustainable, and we want to not only be part of the change – but to make progress happen.
Stina Wahlsten
Sustainability Manager