Sustainable Business Practices: Eco-friendly Benefits
24 April 2025
Tuesday, 22nd April, was Earth Day, and the 2025 theme is Our Power, Our Planet. This year, the Earth Day movement is uniting the globe around renewable energy to help us achieve ‘triple clean energy’ by 2030. Sustainability is at the heart of all we do at Pluxee UK, and we’re constantly striving to innovate our products to provide eco-friendly employee benefits. Discover seven ways to embed sustainable and eco-friendly employee benefits into your business.
The Rise of Greenwashing
With CSR strategies becoming a must-have, companies are coming forward en masse to share their green credentials, giving birth to the term ‘greenwashing.’
We’ve talked about wellbeing washing before, where organisations talk the talk but don’t walk the walk when it comes to employee wellbeing practices. The same is true with greenwashing, but the scrutiny is even higher. If you make a claim about your environmental commitments, you must have the data to back it up. Without the data, it’s simply talk, and you’re at risk of being seen by your clients, consumers, and partners as greenwashing.
Clients and employees increasingly seek businesses that do good environmentally and socially, but they will also want to see the proof. Being branded a greenwasher will harm your reputation among employees, clients and partners, and you could find yourself in court.
Sustainability in Business Practices
So, how do you get CSR right? What are eco-friendly business practices?
There’s a long list of ways you can embed sustainability into your business through eco-friendly benefits and ways of working. Before we get on to our seven tangible tips, here’s how we embed sustainability into the heart of all we do here at Pluxee UK.
An Eco-friendly Business: Practising What We Preach
We have a strong legacy in sustainability here at Pluxee UK. We’re proud of our achievements and work with our Global Pluxee HQ team to define a robust strategy with the data verification processes in place to substantiate our claims.
We’ve done a lot already as Pluxee UK to lessen our impact on the environment, including…
- Moving to a new UK HQ powered by 100% renewable energy.
- We've embraced efficiency and productivity by reducing our office space by 66% without compromising on the quality of our work.
- Our energy-efficient building has seen a remarkable shift from an EPC rating of C to an impressive A, saving energy one green step at a time.
- We convert 100% of our green waste into compost, turning waste into a valuable resource.
- Pluxee independently joined the UN Global Compact to support the Sustainable Development Goals.
- We partnered with OnHand - the Impact Platform in September 2024, and every action a colleague logs contributes to our Pluxee forest. So far, we’ve planted 2,438 trees!
Eco-friendly Benefits: Employee Perks
Our mission is to give our employees more of what matters to them, prioritising their financial wellbeing while keeping sustainability front and centre.
- We’ve abolished reloadable plastic gift cards in place of a digital alternative.
- We’ve swapped our paper reward vouchers for digital ones.
- We’ve launched our Virtual Pluxee Card solution, allowing employees to earn up to 25% cashback without needing a physical card.
- If a client requests physical Pluxee Cards, we produce them from recycled PVC.
When you sell a large volume of products, such as cards and vouchers, the transition to digital significantly impacts our carbon footprint, reducing our Scope 2 and 3 emissions and taking us closer to our Net Zero target.
The Impact on Our Clients
We’re also reducing our clients’ carbon emissions, helping them achieve their environmental goals and strengthening their CSR initiatives by making eco-friendly changes to their everyday business operations.
Boosting Employee Retention & Engagement
Employees want to work for a business that authentically demonstrates ethical behaviours, and they’re scrutinising your corporate social responsibility policy alongside your Employee Value Proposition (EVP).
Conscious quitting is a growing trend among socially conscious employees seeking equally socially conscious employers who contribute to the communities and environment in which they exist. By 2025, Millennials will make up 75% of the global workforce, and they’re looking for socially responsible employers (Teamstage).
Climate anxiety is real, especially among the younger generations, and these are the people who will make up the future workforce. 64% of young people don’t think the government is doing enough to avoid a climate crisis and expect their employers to act responsibly (CNBC).
7 Ways to Embed Sustainable Employee Benefits
We’ve explored the steps we’ve taken on our journey to Net Zero, and below are seven ways you can embrace sustainable business practices through eco-friendly employee benefits.
1. Digital Cashback
As an employee benefit, your people can earn up to 25% cashback when they use our Virtual Pluxee Card to purchase goods online or in-store with our vast range of participating retailers.
It doesn’t stop there! Our prepaid card, powered by Visa, is versatile enough to use as part of your reward and recognition strategy, delivering cash rewards to an employee’s balance. The cashback element stretches your reward further, making even more of an impact.
Then there are channel incentives, loyalty programmes, and student support schemes... our Virtual First Pluxee Card can enhance them all, unifying your internal processes.
Reward, support, and incentivise in an eco-friendly way = more credible CSR initiatives and more engaged employees and consumers.
2. Digital Discounts
Financial rewards are always well received, but incorporating our Employee Discounts into your benefits offering allows your people to save on everyday essentials and treats continuously throughout the year.
With discount vouchers purchased digitally, there’s no need to send anything to print. They're environmentally friendly and help spread your employees’ wages further, making a meaningful difference to their lives. We also offer discounts with a growing range of sustainable retailers.
3. Digital Rewards
HR professionals know that a robust reward and recognition strategy is one of the best ways to boost employee wellbeing, engagement, and productivity. Make your strategy even more impactful by offering rewards your people will love while enhancing your green credentials.
Alongside our Virtual Pluxee Card, our eVouchers are a popular employee reward. With over 150 retailers to choose from, your employees will always find a way to spend their rewards, maximising your investment.
We offer two solutions - eVoucher Codes and eVoucher Cheques - discover the difference between the two in our blog, ‘Christmas Vouchers and Your Employee Rewards Strategy’.
4. Salary Sacrifice Schemes
We can’t discuss eco-friendly employee benefits without stepping into the world of Green Car and Cycle to Work schemes. Both encourage greener ways of commuting to work, whether by an electric vehicle or bike and bring tax and NIC savings to employers and employees.
Greener commuting and money back in your pocket! Read more in our blog, 'Cleaner Commuting Made Affordable'.
The more employees who take up a salary sacrifice scheme within your business, the more you’ll save on National Insurance Contributions. Cycling promotes physical wellbeing, and healthy people have less sickness absence = another saving to your outgoings. Your employees’ finances also benefit from a reduction in the taxable element of their payslips.
Cycling may not be feasible for those travelling long distances, but with your support, they can still make their commute greener. Offer your employees a salary sacrifice car scheme to create tax savings and make low-emission travel more affordable.
Discover what EV car drivers really think about their green cars in our blog, 'Save money & energy with Green Cars… our electric car salary sacrifice scheme'.
5. CSR Partnerships
Embedding paid volunteering opportunities into your strategy boosts morale, social value, and engagement. There are clear benefits to the business, such as being more attractive to potential partners and customers, but it isn’t without cost.
Whenever you pay for a person to be out of the business, you’re funding time that’s essentially non-productive from a business output perspective.
Still, 77% of employees think their employers should incorporate paid volunteering days as an employee benefit, claiming it allows them to learn new skills they can bring back to the business. Our partnership with OnHand allows our Pluxeers to access even more volunteering opportunities within their local communities and is proving incredibly popular - a definite morale booster!
6. Flexibility & Hybrid Working
Flexibility in contracts is becoming the norm, which is excellent because they’re in demand. There are also measurable business benefits, such as an 83% increase in productivity. Offering flexible, hybrid, and remote contracts helps talent acquisition and retention, with 65% of job seekers claiming they’d reject a role that didn’t offer flexibility. The more flexible you are as an employer, the more you support your employees in finding a healthy work-life balance, which will increase employee engagement levels.
Read more in our blog, ‘The Importance of Work-Life Balance & How Employers Can Enhance it’.
From a sustainable business practices perspective, there are additional benefits to having a hybrid workforce. These include:
- Lower fuel and energy usage within the office.
- Moving to smaller premises to accommodate hot-desking.
- Fewer employees driving to the office means lower emissions that you can chart against your climate or social value pledge.
These are all cost-saving activities, which is another way your business will benefit from focusing on green strategies.
7. Funding Benefits with Benefits
The topic of sustainability goes beyond being eco-friendly. Sustainable employee benefits are also those that your business can afford to offer as part of a long-term strategy - the ability to sustain the cost in the long term.
Make employee benefits cost-neutral. Download our Budget-Busting Employee Benefits Strategy Guide.
Every employee who participates in your Green Car or Cycle to Work salary sacrifice scheme saves your business money. What better way to fund a sustainable employee benefits package than through the uptake of benefits? Especially when they reduce your carbon footprint, save employees’ money and enhance their overall wellbeing.
Put Sustainability at the Heart of Everything with Pluxee UK
You're onto a winning formula when sustainable businesses combine with eco-friendly employee benefits. One that increases employee wellbeing while helping you achieve business goals, such as reducing turnover and enhancing productivity.
We’ve given you seven ways to put sustainability at the heart of everything you do, helping you achieve your CSR and business goals. Great things happen when you partner with an employee engagement and benefits provider as committed to sustainable business practices as you are.
