Visma leaves car at home

This week is Visma Car Diet week: a dedicated week within Visma group to rethink our ways of commuting to and from work, and leave the car at home. How does this fit into Visma’s sustainability strategy and what tools do they use for it?

Stina Wahlsten, sustainability manager at Visma, hopes that Car Diet week helps to create more conversation about sustainability: “Conversations are the best starting point to create concrete goals and steps towards more sustainability. The emissions that are saved by leaving the car at home can be measured quite easily, too. This is a step forward in making data-driven decisions.”

Sustainability can mean many things

Car commutes are a visible contributor to Visma’s carbon emissions, and something everyone can help reduce, which the Car Diet week raises awareness to do. Based on a bottom-up initiative from within the group, employees are encouraged to leave their cars at home, and use bikes or public transportation instead.

This is just one of the many actions that Visma undertakes to become more environmentally friendly. Stina: “We use a platform to sell and buy old hardware, for example. Reusing is always better than buying new.”

According to Stina, Visma defines sustainability as more than climate alone. Social aspects are just as important: “When people feel good and get to work on things that they consider important, they are likely to do well.”

Supporting the management cycle at all levels within the corporation

To manage the full spectrum of sustainability, Stina and many Visma companies use SmartTrackers. With approximately 200 companies in the group, each having their own sustainability coordinator and being grouped together under the guidance of six sustainability leads, she needed a platform that supports all roles to make sure the operation runs smoothly at all levels.

Stina thinks the software is fantastic. “A sustainability management tool like SmartTrackers goes beyond comprehensive reporting. It gives an umbrella view on how Visma is doing as a corporation, while giving each company detailed knowledge of their performance at the same time,” Stina elaborates. “It empowers all companies to set sustainability targets along with an emission reduction plan and actions on how to reach said targets.”

According to the sustainability manager, the support this brings to the management cycle is what adds most value. “All sustainability related information and management is in one place, making decision-making easier and sustainability as a whole more comprehensible.”

All of Visma will use SmartTrackers

For Visma’s annual sustainability report over 2022, all Visma companies in the Benelux were already onboarded on SmartTrackers. For the 2023 report, all of Visma will follow. This enables Visma to have clear insights on topics like CO2-emissions, equality and inclusivity. The software gives the companies a way to pragmatically comply with all reporting needs from Visma-group level, while maintaining their independence and control over the sustainability process within their own companies.

I would like to see how SmartTrackers can help me