Veganuary Workplace Challenge

DocuSign Veganuary workplace challenge

By Michelle Li – Enterprise Solutions Consultant at DocuSign

I’m lucky to have been a DocuSign employee for 3 years. Among the many wonderful things about working at DocuSign, our commitment to sustainability is an important one for me.

How the Veganuary Workplace Challenge started

I decided to take on the challenge of introducing the Veganuary Workplace Challenge 2020 to our London office. At DocuSign, we already have a group of employees interested in topics around veganism. We often share recipes and restaurant ideas and discuss other ways we can be more sustainable, both at home and in the office.  We kicked off the workplace challenge by placing a committee meeting on the calendar. This generated a lot of great ideas and the rest was history.

Sustainable Veganuary workplace activities

Over the course of the month, our Veganuary team hosted a number of events and initiatives from lunch runs for vegan burgers to an office vegan cookbook library. Our Dublin office also hosted a number of fun events including a screening of the popular documentary, Gamechangers, and a vegan potluck.

A particularly popular event was our Great Vegan Bake-Off where we had a table full of plant-based goodies. We set up the items in the morning and they were gone by noon. People were commenting on how good everything was and how they couldn’t believe there was no dairy.

Veganuary generated so many questions around the office including, 'where do you get your protein from'  to 'what type of impact does veganism have on the environment and climate change.' Discussions around popular documentaries like Gamechangers and What the Health were also popular in the office, sparking more awareness around sustainability.

As a bonus, we were able to connect with the organisation, Veganuary, who were very supportive of our initiative. They introduced us to healthy and environmentally conscious snack vendors like Clearspring, Merchant Gourmet Pulses and Beans, and Fed by Able & Cole who sent us yummy snacks.

DocuSign London office in vegan restaurant for Veganuary

Friendship alongside sustainability

Perhaps best of all, I had a unique opportunity to get to know people within the office that I don’t usually interact with from a day to day perspective. Our activities brought together people from all parts of our office and created new and stronger relationships which is great from a morality and culture standpoint but also great from a business and employee engagement standpoint.

I’m especially grateful to our Veganuary team who brought in cookbooks, led lunch runs and field trips, designed beautiful banners for our events, and helped promote our activities and causes.  Seeing the DocuSign team so excited about plant-based eating was wonderful. They reported feeling healthier too.

People want to be healthier and they want to do better for the environment, but they don’t always know how to do this. Having a community embark on the journey together was great.

What made all of this possible was having the support from our leadership. When I approached the head of our London office and first shared what was a preliminary idea on Veganuary in the workplace, he was 100% behind me and joined our lunch runs.

In addition to our existing commitment to sustainability with our DocuSign for Forests initiative and IMPACT program, it was wonderful to see DocuSign fully support our Veganuary initiatives in the office. There is definitely more than one way to lead a sustainable life and the fact that we were able to bring awareness to the topic while creating new memories and relationships was the best outcome we could have asked for.

Michelle Li DocuSign

By Michelle Li – Enterprise Solutions Consultant at DocuSign

Author
Mangesh Bhandarkar
GVP, Product Management
Published