Environmental and Sustainability Policy

Introduction and Purpose

eGain recognizes that it has a responsibility to the environment beyond legal and regulatory requirements. We are committed to minimizing the impact of our activities on the environment and providing a safe and healthy workplace for our employees. We operate in compliance with relevant environmental laws and regulations and strive for best practice in all that we do.

At eGain, we endeavor to:

  • Consider environmental concerns and impacts in key decision-making activities.
  • Minimize waste and reduce, reuse, recycle as much as possible.
  • Continually improve and reduce our environmental impact.
  • Communicate our environmental commitments to our customers, clients, and employees.
  • Comply with all relevant regulatory requirements.
  • Regularly review our commitment to protect the environment and support sustainability.

Scope

Through this Policy, we aim to achieve the following:

  • Understanding the environmental impacts of our activities and operations and taking proactive steps to protect the environment and minimize our impact.
  • Obeying all applicable environmental regulatory requirements in the jurisdictions where we have a presence.
  • Advancing and promoting the responsible and efficient consumption of energy and water through conservation programs both in and outside of the workplace.
  • Implementing waste management and minimization strategies and programs to reduce, reuse, and recycle the waste we generate.
  • Increasing employees’ environmental awareness through stewardship and conservation programs.
  • Engaging with our key stakeholders to help ensure that broader perspectives on environmental priorities and shared resources are identified and considered in our business activities.
  • Promoting the responsible use of business travel to manage and minimize our carbon footprint through the utilization of virtual meeting tools and technologies.
  • Developing and adopting a sustainable procurement program and supporting standards to apply across our supply chain.
  • Measuring and reporting our environmental performance through our corporate social responsibility reporting program.
  • Driving continuous improvement in our environmental performance by identifying key performance indicators and tracking our progress against objectives and targets.

This Policy applies to all offices managed by eGain and its subsidiaries, all employees, as well as suppliers, vendors, partners, service providers, contractors, and consultants retained by eGain.

Our Commitment

We encourage environmental awareness among our personnel

Through their daily actions, our employees can significantly influence our environmental performance. We strive to encourage environmental awareness among our personnel on how they can support our goals while limiting their individual impacts and to engage them in environmental sustainability initiatives. Examples of our efforts here include:

Travel and Transport

  • We prioritize public transport over individual vehicle use and we encourage our employees who work out of our offices to use public transportation, such as light rail system, where available and we inform them of pretax benefit for using public transportation as part of our commuter program.
  • We promote a hybrid remote and in-office work schedule for our employees and provide collaboration tools to enable our employees to conduct meetings and projects virtually, reducing the need for travel to our offices daily.
  • We encourage our employees to evaluate the necessity of every business trip planned and consider alternatives to travel where possible.
  • We minimize the frequency and number of short and long-haul flights through adequate planning and scheduling of meeting and events.
  • We encourage car sharing or other group travel for multiple employees travelling to the same location.

Other Office Green Initiatives

  • We provide recycling bins at strategic locations within eGain’s offices, so employees may easily dispose recyclables, such as bottles and aluminum cans.
  • We encourage our employees to use mugs, glasses, dishes, and cutlery rather than disposables.
  • We use coffee makers in our offices that do not require paper filters and we compost coffee grounds where possible.
  • We make sure our offices have at least one large live plant in it.
  • We encourage our janitorial service to clean our offices using green products that are not damaging to the environment.
  • We encourage our employees to go paperless where possible at the offices and print documents only if necessary.
  • We require our janitorial staff to turn off lights in the evening.

We seek to source environmentally sustainable products and services

We understand the importance of incorporating a “green sourcing policy” which will benefit the environment and improve efficiency. To do so, we would consider purchasing materials, products and services that has a lesser or reduced negative effect or increased positive effect on human health and the environment, when compared with competing products that serve the same purpose. Examples of our efforts here include:

Sustainable Sourcing

  • We strive to purchase products which do the least damage to the environment, and which have a positive impact on wider communities where practically and financially viable, such as:
    • Recycled content products (which utilize materials collected in recycling programs that reduces the waste stream going to landfills and incinerators)
    • Energy efficient products (such as products that meet the U.S. Energy Star program standards intended to reduce electricity consumption and decrease volume of pollution related to climate change conditions)
    • Green cleaning products (such as products that meet the standards of third-party organizations like Green Seal, UL Environment, or EcoLogo)
    • Water or vegetable-based lithographic ink to the maximum extent practicable (intended to reduce the amount of VOCs released into the environment)
  • We source locally where possible to reduce CO2 emissions associated with delivery.
  • We aim to support local independent businesses where possible in our purchasing.

We seek to reduce waste and minimize consumption of natural resources

We strive to minimize our consumption of natural resources through procurement opportunities and operational conservation. We aim to reuse and recycle where opportunities exist, which may include managing waste such as e-waste and water where relevant to our business. We responsibly dispose of what we cannot recycle. Examples of our efforts here include:

Reducing Waste

  • We swap disposable cups with reusable ones or choose furniture and carpets which are built for long-term durability.
  • We work with regional specialists to ensure our IT equipment is reconditioned and reused wherever it can be, or otherwise disposed off sustainably and securely.
  • We work with our facilities and procurement teams to phase out the use of single-use plastics from our operations. We strive to remove and replace key plastic items, including plastic cups, bottles, straws, stirrers, plates and cutlery from our offices. In addition to this, our employees are offered reusable steel bottles.
  • We dispose of electrical items in accordance with regulations.

Paper

  • We continually seek to reduce paper use in the office.
  • We buy recycled and recyclable paper where possible.
  • We reuse and recycle all paper where possible.

Water

  • We review energy and water suppliers and take into consideration the source.
  • We use water at our offices primarily for sanitation, landscaping, catering and in-building cooling systems. Where its within our control, we pursue water conservation measures, with emphasis in prioritizing initiatives for locations in water stressed regions.
  • In 2020, as a part of our environmentally conscious use of water, our U.S. headquarters facility in Sunnyvale, California, used 755 CCF of water, a large portion of which was recycled water, and in 2021, we reduced our usage to 414CCF. Part of the reduction was due to the installation of more water efficient toilets and urinals.

We care about our energy usage and carbon emissions

We are committed to tracking carbon dioxide emissions resulting from our energy usage and business travel activities and to implement a continual improvement program to reduce these emissions where possible. We seek to reduce our carbon footprint emissions and we look to implement additional programs in our near future that align with our business strategy. Examples of our efforts include:

Energy Usage

  • We maintain environmentally conscious use of power in our U.S. headquarters by obtaining our power through Silicon Valley Clean Energy (SVCE), a community-owned electricity provider of clean, carbon free electricity options from sources like solar, wind and hydropower.
  • We replaced some of our fluorescent lighting in our U.S. headquarters with LEDs in 2021 and 2022. We plan to replace the rest of the fluorescent lighting with LEDs in 2022 resulting in an estimated 60% reduction in energy used for lighting.
  • When purchasing equipment and systems, we evaluate the equipment and systems based on their energy and efficiency measures, with the goal of ensuring optimal operating and energy efficiency.

Carbon Emissions

  • We installed tinted windows in our U.S. headquarters in 2017 to reduce heat exchange, lessening our energy consumption due to cooling.
  • We regularly perform preventive maintenance on our HVAC systems to ensure they run efficiently.
  • We have enabled economizers to be used on some of the air-conditioning units to draw outside air for cooling. During much of the pandemic period, six of the eight HVAC units at our U.S. headquarters were turned off in order to reduce our carbon footprint.
  • eGain has enabled 99% of its employees to work remotely from our headquarters. We promote a hybrid work schedule that we expect will result in an estimated 40% reduction in employee carbon footprint from travel to that travelled prior to March of 2020 for those employees who work out of eGain’s headquarters.

External compliance with Environmental and Sustainability Policy

We expect our suppliers, vendors, partners, service providers, contractors, and consultants to conduct their operations in ways that are environmentally responsible and require compliance with all applicable environmental laws, regulations, and standards in jurisdictions in which they operate.

Governance, Implementation and Reporting

eGain has a governance system in place and takes steps to implement and review this Policy on an annual basis. The Nominating and Governance Committee of the eGain’s Board of Directors oversees the company’s Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) initiatives. This Policy is reviewed annually by eGain’s Director of Facilities, certain executive management, and other relevant internal control groups, and may be modified to reflect developments in our sustainability strategy or business operations. The results of the review are presented to the Nominating and Governance Committee of the Board of Directors for its consideration. Our executives across the company are responsible for implementing our ESG commitments.

We endeavor to train our employees to understand and manage ESG risks and opportunities affecting our business. We value the perspectives and insights of our internal and external stakeholders, and engage, from time to time, with stakeholder groups. Where appropriate, we discuss environmental and social issues through meetings and open dialogue with employees, shareholders, investors, clients, partners and our community. With respect to internal stakeholders, our ability to execute our sustainability strategy depends on the knowledge and enthusiasm of our employees. We aim to share information on our company’s sustainability initiatives and invite employees to engage on ESG issues. We believe that dialogue with stakeholders is important to ensuring that we consider diverse and timely perspectives in our approaches.

We are committed to providing our stakeholders information about our environmental management and sustainability performance. This Policy, together with our Labor and Human Rights Policy and our eGain’s Code of Ethics and Business Conduct for Employees, Officers, Directors, Contractors, and Consultants have been made available to the public on our website.

Policy Revision

This Policy will be regularly reviewed to ensure its continued adequacy and relevance. It may be amended at any time.

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