Collaboration & Engagement

We’ve made good progress on our sustainability journey, but we realize we can’t solve these issues alone. EMC leverages the collective power and expertise of our employees and industry peers to influence change and transformation throughout our ecosystem.

Employee Engagement

The success of our company, including our never-ending pursuit to be more environmentally responsible, rests on the shoulders of the 53,000 people who work at our company. We engage employees throughout the year in several ways, the most noteworthy being our Innovation Conference’s Sustainability Awards, the Green Business Leadership team, and our quarterly employee sustainability awareness surveys.

• EMC’s annual Innovation Conference encourages and recognizes the power of employee innovation to shape the future. Since launching the program in 2009, we have identified – and implemented – employee ideas focused on data center energy consumption, monitoring enterprise information technology’s (IT’s) carbon footprint and sustainable packaging practices. In 2011, we received 1,590 entries from 25 participating countries and selected 28 winning entries. To learn more about this award, visit Innovation Showcase.
• EMC’s Office of Sustainability, aided by commitments from partners throughout the company, is applying a unified environmental strategy across our business and day-to-day operations. The cross-functional Green Business Leadership team, with 20 participating business units and functions, collaborates to share ideas and practices, align programs, and drive sustainability throughout our operations.
• EMC conducts a quarterly Environmental Sustainability Awareness Survey to better understand employee awareness. The survey is given to 500 randomly-selected employees from our global work base and gives us insight into issues that are most important to employees as well as their understanding of our sustainability programs. Survey questions have included:
  • Awareness of what EMC is doing to protect the environment
  • Awareness of how EMC is helping our customers reduce their environmental impact
  • Whether employees feel good about EMC as an environmental steward
  • Whether employees look for ways to reduce EMC's environmental impact when doing their job

Aside from leveraging the tens of thousands of company employees, we also reach out to external stakeholders as a guide to sustainable innovation at the company. This includes a long list of community leaders, civil society organizations, non-profit organizations, industry experts, customers, shareholders and suppliers.

In 2011, we collaborated with many different partners, industry groups and universities, including Ceres, the Carbon Disclosure Project, the U.S. and Ireland Environmental Protection Agencies, the U.S. EPA SmartWay Transport Partnership, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Product Stewardship Institute, the Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering, the Irish Government, Stanford, MIT and Yale. To learn more, visit Stakeholder Engagement.

Consortium memberships are another important way to participate in the greater IT community. Our employees – ranging from engineers to sustainability professionals – actively participate with industry groups to transform the future landscape. Our memberships include The Green Grid, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC), the Information Technology Industry Council (ITIC), and the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). For a full list of organizations and memberships, visit Corporate Profile.