Véronique di Benedetto

In regard to CSR, what are you especially proud of in your organisation?

What drives us and makes us proud at Econocom is our entrepreneurial spirit. It propels us ever further in positive impact from our actions, both in-house and outside the group. We lay claim to an entrepreneurial sprit that covers CSR as this spirit is also part of our corporate responsibility.

And this approach isn’t new to Econocom – when our founding chairman Jean-Louis Bouchard created the group in 1973, he already applied an anti-waste approach by renting out and reselling second-hand computers. At the time, this was pioneering. It was a common-sense approach: why waste a resource that could be useful to everyone at an affordable price?

So we became part of the circular economy in advance. And as the years have gone by, we’ve enriched this circular policy with extra solutions – upstream we carefully choose equipment and opt for eco-design; regarding use, we rent out assets adapted to specific purposes, we measure and reduce our carbon footprint, and we focus on reparability; and downstream we offer solutions in refurbishing and reuse. In this way, our entrepreneurial spirit has led to an approach that’s incorporated into our business. That’s what we’re proud of – each person acts at their own level. We don’t believe in radical revolutions within firms. That doesn’t work. We’re pragmatic and advance day by day, listening to our clients and partners and grasping their needs and, of course, those of society and the planet.

It’s about building together the future we want, rather than just letting it happen.

Do you know the impact of your services on your corporate clients and in-house teams? Do you have any figures or data to share?

Our positioning as a responsible digital entrepreneur means we measure the impact of our business solutions and in-house operations. Let me give you a few examples to help you understand this approach.

Econocom has developed a solution for measuring the ecological footprint of digital technology. It’s called EcoCarbon. We’ve been applying it to our own operations for four years. By using this solution, we’ve brought down our ecological footprint from digital technology by 50%. Each year, we’ve taken measures that have been pragmatic and reduced expenses:

•  We pooled the data centres of Econocom France considerably in 2018
• We streamlined data-centre equipment and energy consumption in 2019 and 2020
• We steadily increased acquisitions of IT equipment in a green energy class from 2018 to 2020
• We replaced desktop computers with laptops in 2019
• We replaced our multi-function stock with A-category energy-label models and incorporated a badge system in 2019
• We streamlined equipment to match the number of active employees and uses as efficiently as possible from 2019 to 2020
• We reused existing equipment instead of buying new products in 2020

Among our clients, we’ve also observed a 10–15% decrease in their footprint each year when they apply a resolute policy. This is based is on a linear average over several years with the same staff level.

As regards the circular economy, we already fight digital waste by renting out equipment to meet needs as efficiently as possible at any time. What’s more, we try to extend equipment lifespan as much as possible through a policy of efficient reparability, refurbishing and end-of-lease reuse. All the figures on this topic are in our impact report.

Last, regarding business, another example of a solution we developed from scratch using our entrepreneurial spirit is the Green Energy solution – oversight of buildings’ energy costs and financing of energy transition projects. We built this business unit from scratch just five years ago, but it now makes over €20m in revenue.

Regarding in-house operations, we believe we should also have a positive impact to attract talents and create a sense of pride. In recent years, we’ve pursued several projects in collaborative workspaces, remote working, parity and inclusion with conclusive results you can read about in our impact report.

And these actions have been acknowledged: the 2021 ranking of France’s most responsible firms – a survey conducted by Statista and the weekly magazine Le Point – placed us among the 250 highest-performing firms in responsibility and among the 20 most responsible firms in the digital sector. 

What innovations in CSR do you intend to introduce this year?

We plan to speed up development of so-called ‘native CSR’ solutions, which means a CSR dimension – social or environmental – incorporated into the initial design of a solution in all of Econocom’s business lines.

We’d also like to speed up development worldwide, wherever we operate, so that our policy can be more widely applied. We try to ensure all entities can enjoy these advancements and contribute their own ideas and actions.