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Dive into our annual B Corp Impact Report 2022 - with actions, achievements and goals for the future.
2022 was a record year for ev.energy.
We expanded our partnerships with charger manufacturers, automakers, and utilities, enhanced our Solar EV Charging features, and continued our pioneering research and development on smart energy grids.
It’s all part of our mission to connect everyone with cheaper, greener, and simpler EV charging.
All in all, our purpose is to help individuals and businesses to plug into better, ultimately decarbonizing transport and energy industries for the future.
As part of our commitment to creating a better world, we’re delighted to share our annual B Corp Impact Report.
Below, we’ll take a detailed look at our actions and achievements in 2022 and set out our goals for 2023. We’ll cover Governance, Workers, Community, Environment, and Customers - in line with the B Corp framework.
Written by Chris Darby, CTO & Co-Founder
This year, news headlines focused on the devastating impact of the War in Ukraine. An energy crisis has accelerated, highlighting Europeʼs reliance on Russia for cheap gas and oil.
Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, energy grids across the globe were facing an increased supply issue and the likelihood of power outages over the coming years, as we face an uphill battle to balance renewable energy with the increasing demand from electric vehicles.
But we have a solution.
ev.energy provides an automated, cost-saving, and sustainable way to make the grid more flexible. And we’re going further.
We understand that consumers are rightfully concerned about their bills as energy prices increase around the world, which is why we are building new technology to help people leverage renewable energy, access transparent reporting, and connect to cost-saving initiatives from their utility providers.
We also recognize that our employees are crucial to our success and we’re making it one of our top business goals to create a safe-space for them to operate. By fostering an environment where they can grow and react quickly to market and macroeconomic conditions, we can continue to innovate and provide value to our customers.
ev.energy believes that people do their greatest work when they are happy and respected.
We value everyone, and actively support raising the bar of human rights and equality legislation wherever we can.
We want to help everyone achieve more at work as well as in their personal lives and to feel proud of the part they play at ev.energy.
We are a remote-first organisation, with hubs in London, UK, and Palo Alto, USA.
With over 80 people based in 13 countries across the world, we are committed to making remote-first companies work.
When we started ev.energy, the decision to achieve B Corp certification was an easy one. We wanted to ensure that, from day one, we were building a business with a strong social mission at the core and clear commitment at all levels to “do better”.
We fundamentally believe there’s a “win-win-win” to be found between the planet and us inhabiting it. The same is true for the workplace; we can create an awesome place to work, where a diverse group of talented people do their best and are looked after through their employment.
B Corp certification has helped provide a helpful framework to make policy decisions about our employees, suppliers, customers and the broader society.
Without it, it would be easy to optimise for short-term shareholder returns, rather than thinking about the long-term, and the impact our work has on the planet as a whole.
Our B Corp Impact Score is 105.8, as of 5 April 2023.
We completed our first B Corp Employee Survey in 2022, where we asked employees if they felt ev.energy made decisions based on social and environmental impact.
We were pleased to see that over 70% of employees believe that we build social and environmental considerations into our decision making processes.
In 2022, we also started to report on our carbon emissions publically.
Our approach included assessing our employee footprint as well as technological and infrastructural footprint.
We found that as a company we are carbon negative - meaning we are creating more carbon savings than we are producing.
We appraise our internal investments from a social angle to make sure we are allocating resources to areas that can grow our business sustainably.
Salary reviews are analysed at demographic levels to make sure we are rewarding across all of our employee groups as fairly as we can.
ev.energy will create our Code of Conduct to promote ethical decision-making and
prevent corruption. We have started to provide specific training for our commercial teams in particular.
All new joiners will be instructed on our Code of Conduct and provide specific management training to embody them into our daily practice.
Build goals to support social and environmental responsibility as they foster winning teams.
All public reporting will be verified by a reputable third-party source.
We reviewed our employee benefits to ensure we promote a healthier lifestyle for our employees.
Alongside their existing shares and pension packages, we have included enhanced healthcare, life assurance, and maternal, paternal, and shared parental leave policies.
On top of this, we have also introduced an electric vehicle salary-sacrifice scheme to encourage our employees to switch to a greener lifestyle. All benefits are regularly reviewed across our core geographical areas to offer fair and relevant benefits.
We introduced online resources for our employees to access wellbeing, physical, and mental health information. These are regularly shared across email and Slack channels to ensure employees are up to date.
We have also introduced a wellbeing and health segment at our in-person company ʻTeam Weeksʼ where we cover topics such as confidence in the workplace, equality, diversity and inclusion, and how to work with ADHD.
We regularly send pulse surveys to our employees and take action on the responses with the lowest scores to improve our employeesʼ experience.
The introduction of our health assessment means we can provide a duty of care for our employees - particularly within a remote setting.
Not only are we ensuring emergency contact details are collected, but performing health & safety assessments of their desk space, posture, and injury prevention.
We also make available additional information on best practices so our employees can refer to them at all times.
With our first employees returning to work after parental leave, we are looking to introduce support for parents, such as flexible hours, reboarding, and reviewing ways the company can provide support.
We are looking to partner with internship organisations to bring equity into our hiring process.
We understand the importance of role models and mentoring. We are opening different channels to offer our employees a connection with peers and other leadership groups to get them extra support.
ev.energy has matched 100% of employee charitable donations since 2019, capped at 0.5% of our revenues.
Many of our charity recipients are directly related to the climate emergency such as rewilding projects in the UK and Africa, and supporting those in marginalised groups like LGBTQ+ communities who are more likely to be impacted in the future. In total, we donated just over £2,500 in 2021 and £7,500 in 2022.
At least once a quarter we run workshops on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion to raise awareness across the company during our quarterly team week.
So far we have covered female empowerment, diversity in the workplace and tangible actions, and ADHD awareness.
We offer our managers coaching and soft skills training to develop them as leaders.
This also extends to people we believe have a route to management at the company, with the intended outcome of preparing them for what lies ahead.
We will be investing in a female-focused leadership program in 2023, aiming to provide women in the company with key skills for C-suite.
We will aim to put in place more processes and initiatives to hire or promote candidates who possess a protected characteristic, as long as they are as qualified for the role as other applications.
We will provide training for our staff on best interview practices and unconscious bias.
We enhanced our methods for calculating carbon emissions associated with employee work-related travel and home working activities for our Carbon Impact Report.
We had each employee calculate their emissions associated with working for ev.energy - sustenance, travel, accommodation, etc. using a carbon footprint calculator.
Additionally, we used benchmark data from the Homeworking Emissions Whitepaper 2020 produced by EcoAct to account for heating, lighting, and powering employee workstations.
Our Smart Charging technology allows us to charge electric vehicles around the world with the cleanest energy available.
In 2022, we saved 260 tonnes of carbon from being emitted by shifting usersʼ charging sessions to lower carbon times on the grid.
To calculate the carbon savings, we looked at the CO2 emissions a charging session would have had if the vehicle had charged as soon as it was plugged in.
We then compare that with the CO2 emissions associated with the "actual" charging session, where we've optimised for the greenest energy periods available.
The carbon savings from creating and maintaining our smart charging technology more than offset the carbon generated by our team and running our platform in 2022.
Our team and platform operations accounted for approximately 194 tonnes of CO2 emissions, which was more than offset by the 260 tonnes of CO2 emissions that we saved through smart charging our usersʼ vehicles.
Define metric-based environmental impact goals aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and B Corporation Social and Environmental impact goals by June 2023.
Publish guidance on how to reduce carbon emissions associated with home working and promote climate-conscious behaviour.
Implement a sustainability evaluation process for our procurement partners and waste streams, specifically aimed at home working stations and technologies.
At ev.energy we’re passionate about delivering a product and service that our customers value and can truly rely on. Our app ratings over the course of the last year point to an overall improvement in this regard. Our UK iOS rating increased from 4.2 - 4.5, and our US iOS from 3.5 - 4.4.
We also collect Net Promoter Score data and report this as a company wide KPI. NPS scores provide an indication of how much users love your product and if they’re likely to be advocates. Our current score is already high at 36. Our goal is to have an NPS score >40.
We have a global rewards programme that allows our connected EV drivers to earn cash rewards for choosing smarter charging.
As the cost of living crisis kicked in, we developed new rewards for our customers so they could cash in against their energy bills, rather than exchanging for retail vouchers.
We also ensured our customers could have access to the National Grid Demand Flexibility Service (DFS), where we helped them get paid for supporting the UK energy grid over the challenging winter months.
We’ve always felt our app provided value to EV drivers, but customer feedback suggested it wasn’t easy to visualise that value.
Last year we focussed heavily on highlighting the value of our app. We launched monthly stats emails to our customers which highlighted their savings and how they could save more.
We also released new advanced features such as shared EV charging and ev.energy SOLAR, so customers can get even more value from their existing charging set up.
Since the start of 2023 we’ve tracked how satisfied our customers are with the support that we provide them with, both over the phone and via email.
Our goal is for this satisfaction score to be >85% positive.
Achieving this goal would place us well above the SaaS industry standard at 70%.
We want any stakeholder that interacts with our product to have a good experience.
This is not just limited to our drivers. We want to track whether our partners and installers are also having a positive experience when engaging with ev.energy.
To measure this we have set up a Trustpilot business account and will be aiming for a minimum score of 4 stars over the next year.
We want to build a product that our customers love.
To make this goal a reality we will ensure user feedback is used to inform our product roadmap. This comes through support tickets, NPS surveys, and user interviews.
Our goal is to have built 5 user-requested features in the next year.
From everyone at ev.energy, we would like to extend our heartfelt gratitude for taking the time to read our B Corp Impact Report.
We are doubling-down our efforts to electrify everything, creating a sustainable energy system for the world - connecting consumers and companies to greener and cheaper charging.
Let’s all Plug into Better. A simple act that will make a world of difference.
Your attention and interest in our company is greatly appreciated.
Got questions? Don’t hesitate to contact us at support@ev.energy.
We’re hiring! If you want to drive change with us, check out our open roles.
