Sustainability at Inxmail

Are software developers like me interested in sustainability? According to the cliché, our species lives next to pizza boxes and plastic cups and programs in a dark room, isolated from the outside world. The computer monitors illuminate our pale faces, which only see the sun in exceptional cases, and the waste heat from our “infernal machines” is enough to heat the room.

Fortunately, the world at Inxmail is pretty much the opposite. We sit in bright offices in front of whisper-quiet, energy-saving laptops and work as a team on the latest achievements of our software systems. The coffee at Inxmail is fair trade, the fruit is organic, and most people come to work by bike or public transport. Some colleagues are ecologically and socially committed. Freiburg, which is secretly considered the eco-capital, sometimes almost makes you forget that there are still sustainable issues to be tackled here...

Every little helps

Appearances can be deceptive. Packaging waste from lunch, unnecessary lights on or computers and monitors left on. Many people probably don't act this way on purpose, but rather because they don't think about it much. In our day-to-day work, everyone can make a small contribution – with a big impact overall. Just imagine the crazy CO2 reduction if, for example, 130 employees suddenly saved an hour of electricity a day. Or transported food in reusable boxes instead of disposable boxes or aluminum foil.

We're tackling it

It was as if it was meant to be, our CEO Martin Bucher suggested “Sustainability at Inxmail” as a project at ShipIt Days, where employees from different departments work on various topics in an interdisciplinary way. With five colleagues, we pored over everything that goes into making a company sustainable. What are we already doing here and where do we still have room for improvement?

In the end, there were over 20 ideas

We presented the results to our colleagues and were surprised by the largely positive response. But there were also critical questions. We quickly realized that a lot of tact is needed when dealing with this topic. For example, our vague – and unspecified – idea of not serving meat at company parties was misunderstood as an immediate, fixed plan and met with criticism.

Inxmail represents a wide range of personalities and opinions are just as diverse, which enriches us. Even though I sometimes wonder why others can't take things into consideration that I take for granted – confrontation is the wrong approach, especially in a corporate context. A lack of understanding gets us nowhere, but interest and a desire to get involved achieve a lot. We don't want to “missionize” or force anyone to do anything. We also reject “greenwashing” for the sake of external perception. Rather, our aim is to

• anchor sustainability in the company's DNA.
• Raise employee awareness of the issue.
• Collect ideas, define them in initiatives and implement them.

Team Gaia

We realized that two days of ShipIt Day are not enough to permanently anchor sustainable topics in the company. I thought it was great that sustainable entrepreneurship is a real passion project for our CEO Martin Bucher. He inspired us and we founded “Team Gaia”.

We meet with all interested employees twice a month to discuss which sustainability issues we can address in the company and which are best tackled right away. However, we had to learn that many issues cannot be quickly resolved, but rather that topics overlap and many players are affected. What is the point of separating waste if in the end everything ends up in the large waste container again... And you have to keep at it because so much is changing.

Power consumption, green electricity and waste paper

We have purchased an electricity meter to determine how much power our PCs and monitors consume and how much could be saved. In all avoidable power consumption, it is comforting to know that Inxmail only uses green electricity. Further actions included the extent to which waste is separated and how we can increase the use of waste paper.

Printers that have already switched to 100% recycled paper now have a sticker saying “Nature says thank you”. For the few that still have a normal paper tray, we have attached a note explaining how to switch to the recycled paper tray. And when we realized that some of our coffee machines were not yet filled with fair-trade coffee, the office management called the supplier immediately and made sure that this was changed.

Thinking outside the box

I think it's great that you can get involved at Inxmail, not only in my daily work as a software developer, but also by thinking outside the box. It's not just Team Gaia that often works with colleagues from very different teams and fields of activity. In software development, nothing works without teamwork either.

I also like the fact that at Inxmail, a lot of attention is paid to what has lasting value. What things need to be updated and technology updates carried out? Because those who constantly update their technology, constantly learn, who value software quality and test automatically and don't annoy future developers with “spaghetti code” are the ones who are sustainable. When development runs smoothly, it's not just us who benefit in the end, but most of all our customers.

The fact that Inxmail places a strong emphasis on sustainability has shown me that you don't necessarily have to work in an 'eco' industry to make a difference. And if many sustainable companies rely on Inxmail, so much the better.