Continuing the Sustainability Conversation

Receiving this feedback directly from both customers and employees gave us visibility into process gaps as well as opportunities for Akamai to lean in as a trusted partner. It also helped the Corporate Sustainability Team prioritize our work to meet the most critical needs first and engage our employees even more in the Akamai sustainability program.

It’s important to acknowledge that this is not an initiative that a sustainability team typically undertakes; often, a sales team is tasked with building their own approach to integrating sustainability. However, the evolving regulatory landscape provided a timely opportunity to hear directly from our stakeholders in their own words. We pored over their feedback for the better part of 2024 and used it to launch two new learning assets to empower our employees to lead the sustainability conversation with our customers.

Akamai has long prioritized sustainability through employee learning, asking all employees to explore the program through on-demand courses. As environmental regulations have continued to evolve in recent years, we saw 2024 as an opportunity to refresh this content and align it even further with our customers’ needs. Many of these regulations will affect Akamai and/or its customers now or in the future, so the time was right to take action.

From the very early stages, it was critical to create something relevant, aligned, and digestible that would help bring the employee base deeper into the sustainability discussion. When we had struck the right balance of breadth and depth, we decided to call the module Sustainability Essentials and ask all employees to complete the course annually. This not only helps drive alignment across various functions in the business, but also helps Akamai maintain its ISO 14001 standard attestation, which we achieved in 2024.

As we were taking steps to empower employees across all functions, we were simultaneously building on this momentum and filling additional gaps for the sales teams. To meet this need, we launched a companion module called Sustainability Stewardship.

Now we have a pathway for Akamai’s customer-facing sales teams to dive even deeper into the topic. This course takes our sales teams on a journey through environmental regulations, the evolving needs of our customers, and how Akamai can help.

In the same approachable format as the Essentials module, the Stewardship course shares a trove of new resources that we developed in response to feedback from our sales colleagues earlier in the year.

Those who pass the course will receive a Credly badge they can display on LinkedIn, signaling to customers that we heard them and are actively working to help support their sustainability journeys. Closing the feedback loop in this way was important to us to demonstrate to all stakeholders that they are a critical part of the next evolution of the program.

We fully appreciate that this conversation is much bigger than a single company, industry, or region. We see this as an evergreen discussion that only gets more impactful with an even wider range of voices, insights, and nuance.

In support of this journey, we will be expanding our focus by listening to and learning from customers and employees in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region in 2025. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to sustainability, so we are excited to learn how we can continue to shape the discussion with relevancy and a prescriptive geographic perspective.

Whether you’re an Akamai customer, employee, or partner, this conversation is most productive when we all join in. We are all figuring this out in real time, so the more we can share our successes, challenges, and unique perspectives, the greater our chance for success.