Growens shares the fourth edition of its Sustainability Report

For the fourth consecutive year, Growens publishes its Sustainability Report. The new 2022 edition includes some innovations, starting from an updated materiality analysis to a stronger focus on initiatives towards the environment.

“In its fourth edition, the Report is part of an increasingly articulated and strategic sustainability path, which aims at the progressive integration of ESG issues in every aspect of the Group’s business: from policies in favor of people to the expansion of environment-related activities; from support for local communities to relief actions for the Ukrainian population.

2022 was a key year in the evolution of the Group. Exactly twenty years earlier, in 2002, we founded the company that, in the following two decades, would become the strong, healthy and international Group it is today.”

These are the words, taken from the Letter to Stakeholders, stated by the CEO Nazzareno Gorni and the Chairman Matteo Monfredini about the role and purpose of the 2022 Sustainability Report.

Process, perimeter and framework of the Report 

The Sustainability Report is issued on a voluntary basis by the Group. It includes the goals proposed by the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SDGs) and is drawn up according to the guidelines of the GRI Sustainability Reporting Standards, issued in 2016 by the Global Reporting Initiative and updated in 2021.

To account for its activities, Growens created an internal group within the company, with the task of collecting the information required for the drafting of the document. The report covers the period from 1 January – 31 December 2022.

Material topics and document structure 

Like every year, the Company has updated the materiality analysis, as a valuable tool capable of intercepting information needs to be included in the report.

A structured process was put in place to identify the main impacts that the Group’s activities have or could have on the ESG (environmental, social and economic) sphere. This enabled a detailed definition of the reference context both inside and outside the organization:

• Benchmark analysis on a sample of 15 competitors, peers and comparable companies;
• Review of existing internal documentation, such as strategic plans, company policies and procedures, management systems and sustainability plans;
• Analysis of public files, articles, statistics, reports, sector studies on the impacts generated by companies in the IT industry;
• Assessment of the main international standards and frameworks adopted in sustainability reporting (GRI Standards, SASB, TCFD), including those to be published soon (ESRS and IFRS Sustainability Standards).

At the end of this first phase, the impacts identified were clustered on the basis of their mutual level of affinity, in order to obtain a shortlist of 14 ESG topics to be subjected to quantitative assessment by the Top Management (9 managers) and a representative sample of the main categories of Group Stakeholders (27 customers, 75 employees and 1 investor). 

Such topics were connected to the following areas: governance area, economic area, social area, infrastructural area, environmental area. They were submitted to the main categories of Company Stakeholders through an online questionnaire (in Italian, English or Spanish according to the recipient).

Through such questionnaire, the Stakeholders expressed their assessment on the significance of the non-financial impacts (taking into account their size/severity and probability) that the Growens Group’s corporate activities and its value chain generate or could generate on the economic, environmental and social spheres.

At the end of the process, the results allowed to identify and prioritize 8 material topics for the Growens Group.

Growens’ main initiatives in 2022

The Group has arranged its 2022 Sustainability Report by dividing it into three macro-areas: governance, environment and social (ESG). For each one, Growens has then reported, in detail, its work with reference to the topics that were selected as material for the Group.

Governance 

2022 marked an important evolution in the Group’s history, which has earned the title of main Italian player in the cloud marketing technologies sector thanks to the Contactlab acquisition and its merger with MailUp.

Given its strong expansion, Growens was included among the 800 fastest growing Italian companies according to Repubblica Affari & Finanza, earning the 2023 Champions of Growth award.

In 2022 the Group distributed 99% of the economic value generated, contributing to the wealth of the ecosystem with which it interacts (employees, investors and communities).

Environment 

Growens has always been involved in activities towards the environment, and 2022 saw the beginning of more structured initiatives.

The Group has kept enlarging its forest, in collaboration with Tree-Nation. In order to offset the carbon emissions produced by all its business units and for each new customer who relies on its services, the Group plants trees and supports forest conservation projects, with the aim of offsetting its CO2 production.

During 2022 Growens has:

• Planted 9113 trees
• Reforested 8.1 hectares
• Absorbed 2088,69 tons of CO2

Last, for its cloud infrastructure, the Group has chosen to refer to Amazon Web Services (AWS), which undertakes to manage its activities in terms of carbon dioxide reduction, allowing savings of over -67% of CO2.

Social

The Group does business taking into consideration the social context in which it operates and the people who work for and within the Company.

The WoW manifesto, which guarantees the entire organization a hybrid and flexible way of working, turned one year in 2022, keeping on its mission to guarantee all employees a better work/life balance.

The Group also continued to pay the utmost attention to customer data protection and to financially support sports, cultural and non-profit associations within the communities in which it operates, for a greater social well-being.