The built environment is responsible for roughly 40% of global energy consumption, and commercial real estate leaders are looking for ways to convert their ambitious sustainability agendas into action. In response, JLL has unveiled Sustainable Operations – the real estate industry’s only end-to-end sustainability solution developed to help companies configure, launch, and manage portfolio-wide sustainability programs.
With facility executives starting to translate their green intent into ambitious sustainability targets, the industry is reaching a real tipping point on how to drive the decarbonization of the built environment. JLL finds that 96 percent of its top 50+ global clients have set ambitious, publicly stated sustainability goals – but only 19 percent have a clear sustainability action plan with committed spend to achieve those goals.
Knowing data alone will not solve challenges, JLL launched Sustainable Operations to provide companies insights and action informed by data to help leaders achieve their goals. The Sustainable Operations offering is action-oriented and designed to help organizations reach their sustainability goals more cost-effectively and efficiently – no matter where they might be on their sustainability journey.
Through a holistic approach powered by technology, delivered by top talent and supported by integrated services, Sustainable Operations offers portfolio-wide sustainability programs to maximize ROI and scale globally at speed. This includes using JLL’s data and insights platform, Azara and the sustainability technology and analytics platform, Canopy – both built by JLL Technologies. Azara uses machine learning to unite disparate datasets into one platform, accelerating data-driven portfolio, facilities, space and workplace management insights from months to days. In tandem, Canopy centralizes utility and environmental data to more efficiently manage and monitor cost and performance, allowing companies to quickly pinpoint opportunities to optimize sustainability performance. In 2020 alone, JLL clients used Canopy to track more than $300 million in energy cost savings and measure 193.8 million pounds in CO2 emission reductions.
“We track sustainability performance across 48,940 buildings, representing 2.1 billion square feet of client space, worldwide through Canopy,” said Neil Murray, Global CEO, JLL Work Dynamics. “We’re able to tap the power of technology and analytics to better understand CRE data and not only offer strategic actions for our clients to improve their performance, but actually implement those changes for them to drive meaningful change. That is the power of combining technology and sustainability into a singular strategy.”
Delivered by JLL’s global team of more than 300 sustainability professionals and supported by its comprehensive suite of sustainability services – spanning strategy, reporting, ratings and certifications, assessments, renewable energy, engineering design and more – Sustainable Operations programs are optimized in real-time for teams to unlock the potential of data and take action to help accelerate companies’ progress in reaching their sustainability goals.
A JLL Fortune 500 financial client recently said, “We aspired to drastically reduce our global energy consumption by 2-3% annually and lower carbon emissions by 40% per full-time employee. Working with JLL, we created a governance structure, used tools to improve data tracking and transparency and benchmarking dashboards for 80% of our global utility bills. These improvements allowed us to deliver our energy reduction goal more than 3 years early – cutting carbon emissions by 50%.”
Corporate Solutions Becomes Work Dynamics
In other news, JLL has renamed its Corporate Solutions business JLL Work Dynamics. By combining the best of real estate, technology and sustainability solutions, JLL is creating positive workspaces for clients across the globe. Work Dynamics offers integrated services with a dedicated emphasis on sustainability and technology, enabling clients to enhance the performance of their portfolios and help realize the goal of a more sustainable built environment.
“As the world of work rapidly transforms, a more human-centric, resilient, and responsible real estate approach is required,” said Murray. “Work Dynamics is more indicative of our purpose – enabling organizations to shape their workplaces to create a better world of work for their people.”
Work Dynamics is designed to meet organizations where they are in their journey, whether an organization is setting their first environmental, social and governance goals or is considered a sustainability leader, to create safe, sustainable, and inspiring spaces. The pandemic has ushered in a new age of responsibility, urging organizations to take bold action for their employees, customers, communities and society at large. With Sustainable Operations, companies can shift beyond traditional boundaries to realize more impactful climate resilient strategies and drive meaningful progress toward the transition to net-zero.
JLL Work Dynamics partners with leading organizations, across industry sectors, advising, creating, managing, and optimizing environments that achieve a more human-centric, resilient, and responsible approach to shaping a better world of work. Through technology-enabled solutions, Work Dynamics creates safe and inspiring spaces around the world for people to collaborate, innovate, and drive meaningful change anywhere that work is performed. With more than 45,000 local and global specialists, the team enables clients to enhance the performance of their portfolios and people to realize their diverse ambitions including a more sustainable built environment. Work Dynamics manages more than 1.6B square feet of real estate and has averted more than 112,700 metric tons of CO2e by advising clients on renewable energy projects. JLL’s Supplier Diversity program extends the company’s corporate values of diversity and inclusion to its business strategy, spending nearly $1B in 2020 with over 1,000 small and diverse businesses globally.
