Engineering climate impact: how Culture Amp found win-win solutions on their path to net zero

This is the first in a series of blogs where we interview founders and operators in our portfolio on the surprising and interesting ways they are having a positive impact on the world: from climate to team culture to life-improving technologies. In this first blog, we hear from Culture Amp’s Ella McKinley and Artem Yakimenko on how they cut emissions through engineering. 

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While headlines may scream the death of environmental, social, and governance (ahem, ESG) work, more and more companies are taking a practical and responsible approach to managing their environmental impact.

Culture Amp’s employee research has shown that commitments to sustainability drive employee pride and engagement – and thus retention. But in 2021 Culture Amp’s B Corp re-certification process uncovered something surprising: despite being a company dedicated to having a positive impact on the world, they had little to no intentional effort to consider the impact on the planet in their operations. The assessment was a wakeup call. Over the last 4 years, they’ve built a sustainability program that’s meaningfully moved the needle. 

Now, they’re sharing their Net Zero Plan and the steps they’ve made to achieve it in a way that’s actionable for businesses of all sizes. Here, Culture Amp’s Sustainability Lead Ella McKinley and Director of Engineering Artem Yakimenko share the practical strategies they’ve used to drastically lower Culture Amp’s product carbon footprint in a way that’s also led to operational efficiency. If there’s one lesson from all this work, it’s that sustainability often comes with win-win solutions when implemented correctly. 

Culture Amp is a company focused on creating a better world of work, not necessarily a better climate. Why are you investing in climate mitigation? 

EM: Culture Amp is a “people-first” company with a passionate position on sustainability. Our founders believe that operating sustainably isn’t just a nice-to-have, but essential to achieving our mission of building a better world of work. In 2024, we launched our bold Net Zero Plan, focusing not only on creating internal change but also on inspiring action across our suppliers and customers.

While we started out investing in climate because we care about our impact, what’s been interesting to see is how much interest and support we’ve had from our customers and investors. Investing in climate mitigation gives us a sales edge in a competitive landscape where companies are increasingly conscious of emissions in their supply chain.

We’re seeing sustainability become a focus for enterprise customers, especially during the RFP process.

This trend is particularly noticeable in Australia, the UK and Europe. Not only are sustainability requirements becoming more common, but they’re also getting more stringent. For example, one customer recently introduced a supplier sustainability clause in their contracts, which mandates that we commit to science-based targets. Equally, our investors are looking at their financed emissions and concerned about the environmental risk profile of their portfolio. 

Our work has focused on measuring the impact of our sustainability work on the employee experience. We’ve begun asking about Campers’ (what we call our employees) beliefs in our commitment to sustainability day-to-day, and have found that our commitment directly and positively influences employee engagement. We’ve even created questions our customers can use to gain the same insight. And we’ve found that investments in this space have an outsized impact. We dug into the millions of customer data points we’ve collected on the Culture Amp platform. What we found was a commitment to sustainability does boost employee engagement but the uptick is most pronounced if it’s perceived as genuine. This is a powerful reminder: employees can spot real impact from empty talk.

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Culture Amp wasn’t always a leader on sustainability. How did you get started?

EM: The first thing we did is what I would recommend any company new to climate action do – measure their carbon footprint. This enables you to get a picture of what the climate impact of the business is and where emissions reduction opportunities lie. There are lots of newer SaaS tools that can help do this relatively cheaply. 

Measuring our emissions laid the foundation for us to set emissions reduction targets. We started with a commitment to Tech Zero which is an alliance of tech companies around the world working together towards net zero. I’d recommend Tech Zero as a great way for early-stage tech companies to leverage external momentum around climate action. 

As we matured our approach we went down the route of setting detailed emissions reduction targets and getting accreditation from the UN-backed Science Based Targets Initiative. We’re always looking for opportunities to collaborate and link in with global initiatives. That’s where we can have an outsized impact on the climate crisis. 

What did you learn as you started to measure emissions?

EM: I was surprised by how much of our emissions footprint is in our supply chain (scope 3) rather than our direct operations (scope 1) and energy emissions (scope 2). Talking with other tech companies around the world I’ve found this is common - for many companies like us 90%+ of our emissions are indirect. That’s because software companies often have less tangible assets like buildings, machinery, and equipment than similar-sized companies in other sectors. This means much of our climate impact comes through suppliers like data centres and travel providers. These emissions can be tricky to address because we have less control over the carbon footprint of other companies. 

Why did you focus on data centres, and what steps did you take to reduce emissions?

EM: Culture Amp’s employee experience and people analytics tools help organisations save time and make smarter decisions, but running software on external servers can contribute to considerable carbon emissions.

‍When evaluating our own impact, data centre providers consistently rank among our top three suppliers, meaning they play a major role in our emissions and the overall sustainability of our product.

‍TechZero research found that, among tech companies worldwide, half identify data centres and cloud services as their largest source of Scope 3 emissions.

When I spoke with our Engineering team they were also looking to optimise our cloud presence from a cost and efficiency perspective. That made this project a win-win-win. We moved away from older, power-hungry processor architectures to efficient new ones and optimised our usage patterns.

This resulted in a 49% reduction in downstream data centre emissions despite growing our business at the same time. 

AY: There was a decent amount of planning and brainstorming involved, including reaching out to our cloud partners. In the end, we chose a 3-pronged approach led by our SRE teams. We were ultimately able to realise ~12% cost savings on our monthly bills, while reducing our cloud emissions by 49%. 

First, we focused on migrating workloads to more modern and efficient CPUs and architectures. Specifically, we moved x86 workload preferences from older, less-efficient architectures (e.g., Skylake and older) to newer generations. This increased performance and reduced emissions with negligible cost impact by taking advantage of the smaller manufacturing node process and other improvements. We also made our runtimes and code compatible and able to take advantage of the newer ARM architecture. In our practice, those provide ~15% cost savings with no-to-positive impact on performance. It is even easier with vendor-hosted services (e.g., databases) as they do all the tuning and porting needed. This also significantly improves your emissions as ARM has much better performance per watt characteristics. 

Second, we used cheap(er) capacity. We initiated a project to use more spare provider capacity via instance marketplaces and preemptible instances. We also used “just in time” compute resources (i.e., AWS Fargate), which led to a smaller reduction in total cost, but a huge reduction in emissions. This is because you only use a fraction of shared resources, taking advantage of sustainability best practices your vendor puts in place for their control plane. 

Last, we took advantage of asynchronous architectures. The more asynchronous your workloads are, the easier they are to optimise for cost, capacity, and emissions. We admittedly got a bit lucky here due to the nature of many of our workloads. For other types of services like streaming there’s usually a higher impact on costs and emissions as “pre-warmed” resources are almost always required, which are more challenging to line up cheaper capacity for. This is especially relevant with increasing AI workloads, many of which tend to be synchronous.

What did these changes cost, in terms of time and money?

AY: This took our SRE teams a non-insignificant amount of time - about six months - but the “costimisation” has mostly paid for itself with the substantial savings they achieved.

Where do you get the expertise to do this? What advice would you give to others looking to complete a similar project?

AY: One of the keys to our success is that our teams came up with many ideas for this themselves. Something that also made this easier was that we chose methods and times that didn’t disrupt the rest of the Engineering organisation, so the impact outside of our team was minimal (which drastically reduced the disruption “cost” of the initiative).

To nail down the specifics for your architecture and use case, we highly recommend working with your cloud hosting provider. They will be able to provide you with the best optimisations for your hardware and software. For example, AWS has a great collection of ARM optimisation resources and a very thorough porting advisor.

Culture Amp took on this project when they were a decade old with thousands of customers. How might both much larger and much earlier companies think about this kind of work?

AY: Regardless of company size, this is something any organisation can do. I think the key is to invest in your people and trust them to do the right thing - this work just wouldn’t have been possible without our engineers bringing their inspiration and technical acumen to the table.

EM: Operationalising sustainability demands collaboration and creative solutions. It’s about bringing together teams that don't typically work side by side - like sustainability, engineering, and finance. By fostering cross-functional conversations, companies spark fresh ideas and gain buy-in for innovative approaches. Regardless of size, any organisation can create space for these discussions and embrace new ways of thinking.

What’s next on the climate agenda for Culture Amp?

EM: There are a few areas that we’re really excited to be focused on: 

• Renewables: We’ve seen a 10x increase in our use of renewable electricity this year and are aiming for 100%. 
• Carbon removal: We’re working on investing in projects that help remove carbon from the atmosphere proportional to what our direct operations have emitted.
• Regulatory disclosures: We’re working on compliance with the rapidly-changing global landscape of climate risk management disclosures, including new requirements in Australia.
• Employee ownership: We pay the cross-functional members of our ‘Camp Climate Crisis’ employee resource group for their time on the board. Through this group we are working on driving grassroots behavioural change and education. 

Resources to get started:

For those looking to embark on their own climate action journey, here are some useful resources:

• Tech Zero Toolkit: A comprehensive guide to help tech companies of all sizes commit to and achieve net zero emissions.
• AWS Graviton Getting Started: Technical guidance for using AWS Graviton processors to optimise performance and reduce emissions.
• Porting Advisor for Graviton: A tool to help analyse and optimise code for compatibility with AWS Graviton processors.

By leveraging these resources and learning from Culture Amp’s journey, other companies can take meaningful steps towards sustainability, proving that doing good for the planet can also be good for business.