Those employees invested their time to generate an annual reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. It’s reasonable to think about how much these employees each gained for the personal time they invested.

Before we do the calculation, we need a quick disclaimer. There is no accurate way to credit individual employees with these carbon savings — we don’t know precisely who did what, and there is no way to quantify exactly how important any given hour of time investment was to achieving this outcome.

So we are not doing that.

What we can do is this. We can run a quick and dirty thought experiment to give us a very rough idea of just how much comparative climate leverage tech professionals have. And we can be really conservative with our estimates to make sure we don’t overstate the potential for impact.

There are currently 8200 employees at Workday. Let’s be generous and say that 500 of them were responsible for driving the sustainability program into implementation. That’s one-eighth of their entire workforce! So we are being extremely conservative. In reality for a company this size, it is common for a much smaller number of collaborating employees to drive these initiatives forward. But let’s move forward with the calculation.

27,000 tonnes / 500 employees = 54 tonnes of annual carbon dioxide savings per employee.

By this measure, Workday employees creating and supporting the sustainability initiative each now have 45 times more annual impact than if they had maxed out their 1.2 tonne potential personal saving. That’s forty-five times more impact for each tech worker’s time invested, and that’s being really conservative.

Of course, we are not saying you should ignore your personal carbon footprint. However it is clear that if you are a technology professional you can multiply your impact way beyond the level achievable by personal changes alone.

How to leverage your position

That example gives an idea of the incredible scale of impact possible in the tech industry. Of course, if you work in tech you are probably already used to thinking about scale.