Herman Miller
Climate Impact & Sustainability Data (2022)
Reporting Period: 2022
Environmental Metrics
ESG Focus Areas
- Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging
- Employee Well-being
- Health Equity
- Neurodiversity
Social Achievements
- Increased belonging scores for Black employees during the pandemic (remote work)
- Weaving diversity goals into corporate strategy for easier implementation of initiatives
Climate Goals & Targets
Environmental Challenges
- Uncertainty surrounding the long-term effects of remote work on productivity and innovation
- Conflicting studies on remote work's impact
- Hidden costs of worker time and energy in learning new tools
- Technology skills gap among employees
- Potential for mishandling new technology rollouts
- Balancing employee autonomy with certainty to prevent stress
- Equity and belonging issues in remote and in-office work
- Difficulty in finding perfect solutions to meet everyone's needs in inclusive design
Mitigation Strategies
- Designing spaces that support new work behaviors and leverage technology
- Closer collaboration with IT to ensure digital and physical environments support each other
- Providing self-assessment toolkits to help employees make decisions about work arrangements
- Creating a sense of community among employees through various means
- Developing structured ways to discuss needs balancing team and individual needs
- Bringing diverse voices into design discussions
- Educating themselves on topics like neurodiversity
- Using pilots and iterative design to test and evolve solutions
- Synthesizing quantitative and qualitative data to inform design decisions