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Not long ago, I met a lawyer in London called Tom Goodhead who said something that stuck with me.
His firm, Pogust Goodhead, pursues class action lawsuits against large companies over environmental disasters and said one reason for its rapid growth was the large number of young lawyers eager to join from older, more established firms who were happily defending the same companies. .
I later spoke with a young litigator Goodhead had hired from a global corporate law firm with many fossil fuel clients. “I took a huge professional risk to be on the right side of history,” Edmund Bentsi-Enchill told me. “But it’s definitely worth it.”
For a long time I thought stories like this were interesting but unrepresentative.
A handful of young people in a city like London, in a field like law, might be willing to leave a venerable employer for a green-leaning startup. But has so-called “climate abandonment” really taken off? Do employers really need to demonstrate that they care about the environment if they want to retain younger staff? The evidence increasingly suggests they could, and not just in places like London.
I say this after having gone through a survey of nearly 23,000 Gen Z and millennial workers in 44 countries that Deloitte consultants published a couple of weeks ago.
In case your understanding of generational clichés is as vague as mine, Deloitte defines Generation Z as those born after 1995 and millennials after 1983. In other words, people who are generally in their 20s and 30s and They make up almost half of full-time employees. American workforce in 2021.
This is the 13th annual study of its kind that Deloitte has conducted and shows that around 20 per cent of younger staff now say they have changed jobs or industries due to environmental concerns. A slightly higher percentage say they plan to do this in the future, and more than 70 percent say green credentials and policies are important when seeking employment.
These figures agree with the European Investment Bank investigation Last year, that showed that 76 percent of Europeans in their 20s say the climate impact of potential employers is an important factor, and 22 percent say it is a top priority.
However, the most notable point of the Deloitte survey is that it shows a growing need for employers to have more than just a climate policy.
The share of workers in their 20s who say they and their colleagues are pressuring their companies to take action against global warming has increased from 48 percent in 2022 to 54 percent in 2024. The increase was similar for millennials.
The measures they want range from training staff in sustainability and renovating the office to make it greener, to the much more demanding prospect of transforming the core business model to make it more climate-friendly, a suggestion made by almost 20 percent of the workers surveyed. . A similar proportion said they would like to see their employer “work more closely with governments to promote sustainability initiatives”.
When I asked Deloitte to dig deeper into their data to see if this trend was more pronounced in Western Europe or North America, as I expected, they gave me surprising news.
Both regions were surpassed by Southeast Asia, a region that includes Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. A whopping 66 percent of Gen Z workers and 71 percent of millennials in that part of the world said they were pressuring their organizations to take action on climate change. The corresponding figures in mature Western markets were only 50 percent and 42 percent respectively.
The industries that feel this pressure the most are also interesting. Deloitte data shows that it is staff in financial services, followed by the energy and resources sector, who are most likely to push for change. Business services and consumer companies are far behind.
Deloitte global head of sustainability Kathy Alsegaf says it’s not clear exactly why this is the case. It could be that climate action is more visible to employees in customer-facing sectors, such as consumer products, or in Western countries, so that workers don’t feel the need to push for more action. Or it could be something else.
Either way, I’ve had to change my mind. Companies do not have to take climate action seriously. But if they don’t, they could find it increasingly difficult to recruit (and retain) all the younger workers they need.