As organizations intensify their efforts to develop more sustainable solutions and foster a culture of transparency, empowerment and inclusivity, Kyndryl is making notable progress toward a more sustainable and inclusive future.

In our fiscal 2024 Corporate Citizenship Report, we share how we fueled a culture of innovation, nurtured trusted relationships and made progress on our holistic corporate citizenship strategy to expand our global impact. We continue to promote policies and programs that align with our business strategy, international standards and positive outcomes for our stakeholders, communities and the planet.

Here, Faith Taylor, Senior Vice President of Global Citizenship and Sustainability, discusses Kyndryl’s second Corporate Citizenship Report and how we are building on a strong foundation to fuel future success.

 

 
What’s one major takeaway from Kyndryl’s 2024 Corporate Citizenship Report?

We shared key strategies and goals in last year’s Corporate Citizenship Report, our first as an independent company. Our 2024 report covers our progress and accomplishments across 60 countries and outlines our goals and the three core elements of our corporate citizenship strategy: environment, people and trust. We’re showing what Kyndryl’s purpose looks like in action — how we are “walking the talk.”

 

 
Let’s start with environment. What are some key highlights?

Through actions that include executing our datacenter optimization strategy and improving our energy efficiency, we reduced our energy consumption and scope 1 and 2 emissions by 9% and 8%, respectively. We obtained global ISO certifications for our integrated Environmental and Energy Management System to operationalize our goals. We also had our net-zero goal validated by the Science Based Targets initiative, which is part of our commitment to following industry best practices in line with the latest climate science. For our customers, our experience as a young company implementing these initiatives demonstrates how it can be done — we say we’re Customer Zero — and in turn brings us credibility in launching sustainability services that help them achieve their own environmental and business goals.

 

 
How does Kyndryl’s experience as Customer Zero help customers achieve their goals?

After our spin-off in November 2021, technology was at the center of our transformation — we worked to consolidate our application portfolio by 80%. But we also had to build our corporate citizenship program from the ground up. With the commitment of our CEO, senior leadership and cross-functional teams across the globe, we worked together to determine our new programs, baseline and boundaries, analyzed our supply chain emissions and developed an integrated financial and emissions model to validate our performance. In 2022, we announced our net-zero goal, and we’ve continued to harness technology and integrate sustainability into our business to move closer to our environmental targets ever since.

We say we’re Customer Zero because we can take what we’ve learned on this journey, combine it with our more than 30 years of IT experience and strong partnerships, and help solve our customers’ sustainability challenges. Climate change is a global concern — and we have to work together at this critical moment to develop and scale global solutions. As companies look to become more sustainable, inclusive and secure to meet increasing regulations and stakeholder demands, we’re committed to helping them at each step in their journeys by applying what we’ve learned as Customer Zero and growing our business services. Our Global Sustainability Barometer study is one example of the resources we have developed to outline challenges and opportunities related to technology, people and business strategy. We are also working with partners such as Microsoft to scale global sustainability solutions together.

 

 
What role does Kyndryl’s culture play in corporate citizenship?

Speaking of transformation — ours would not have been possible without developing a new culture that prioritizes people. Our Kyndryl Way culture reflects the values that drive our performance. It outlines what it means to be restless with a sense of urgency to develop responsible solutions, empathetic in how we care for our people and planet, and devoted to shared success by collaborating internally and externally to solve global issues.

From day one, we focused on supporting the communities where we live and work, and building an inclusive workforce that delivers for our customers. Our report highlights some new initiatives that empower our people and communities. We transformed our core human capital technology and processes to drive continuous skills development and established our new global well-being strategy to help our workforce thrive. The Kyndryl Foundation, our company’s philanthropic arm, delivered its first grants to address critical societal issues. And our employees nearly doubled their volunteer hours to support communities and participated in our 70+ Kyndryl Inclusion Networks (KINs) to fuel a culture where everyone feels they belong.

 

 
How does Kyndryl build and maintain trust?

We’ve prioritized building integrity, accountability and effective governance across our company. As examples, we achieved a 100% completion rate for our Code of Conduct and cybersecurity trainings for eligible employees in the last year. The report also covers how our Enterprise Risk Management program enables us to manage risks proactively and how we’re responsibly approaching AI as it transforms industries.

 

 
What’s next for Kyndryl’s corporate citizenship efforts?

We are looking forward to continuing to see the results of our actions. It’s one thing to draft policies and set targets. It’s another to quantify how much we’ve reduced a company’s energy use by moving their workloads to the cloud. Or to hear from a student who felt empowered to pursue a career in STEM because of mentorship from a Kyndryl Distinguished Engineer. We know we’ll learn more from our customers, partners and employees in the coming year about what translating our purpose into action means for them — and we’ll have more to share in next year’s report.

 

Faith Taylor

Senior Vice President, Global Citizenship and Sustainability