The Matcha Initiative
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With 17 years of experience in IT across different sectors and industries, Benoit managed a team focusing on project management and IT application support in Singapore. In 2017, he was one of the founders, and later on leader of Credit Agricole CIB's first green team in Singapore. Since 2022, he has started in France a new adventure within Credit Agricole Assurances (CAA) and managed up to 24 people, in software integration team.
Recently, in September 2023, he was promoted to ECODESIGN Coach within CAA. He is creating and deploying a new framework for all projects to add a sustainability dimension to help CAA reduce its environmental impact.
I will be glad to share my experience or help others to move towards a better and sustainable environment if I can. Let’s keep in touch.
To be honest it started more out of curiosity than it was a clear goal initially. Later, it became a necessity for me, as you cannot do everything at home, which is very far from what is done at work, to be aligned with your thoughts or convictions.
I started by building a community, to understand who showed interest around me and get ideas from my fellow colleagues.
The awareness of what sustainability means in the office has been raised, from employees to top management. The concept of doing things differently, with another parameter (environmental criteria) than cost, has been introduced.
We are working now more consciously to minimize our impact on the environment, make our employees feel good and sometimes even increase our own well being.
Mainly to find people who understand you, who trust you and also how to work towards the interest of the company. Then, you need sponsorship from management and finally draw a detailed plan to executives and motivate people.
Having a team of volunteers with limited budget is a challenge (how to keep people motivated over time, the frustration of having a limited impact).
We have overcomed the challenge by recruiting new green team members, earning trust from the management and the community, and by showing real, measurable impacts from the implementation of the initiatives. Definitely, a big part is commitment and learning. Innovating and increasing our network also helped a lot to overcome difficulties.
Of course, it is challenging, as our roadmap was delayed for 6 months and most of the team members were not able to participate (more workload due to the pandemic - necessity to adapt to new work conditions, communication and work in a remote environment).
But it also created new opportunities (things that were not allowed before and needed to be (re)activated, think out of the box during emergency situations, facilitate quicker decision).
It will change the approach as we have physical constraints, interaction being limited, some aspects were totally cancelled. But it can open new doors or oblige you to adapt/innovate quickly.