The aim of promoting education and training is at the heart of our social responsibility efforts. This is why we train young people in commercial professions and offer vocational training as part of the integrated degree program in Business Informatics. Moreover, we support student and university organizations as well as academic chairs with cooperations and donations and are involved in research and teaching through the zeb.business school. In 2019, we again succeeded in meeting our self-defined goal of more than 30 courses with students; 34 courses took place. 

Corporate volunteering is also an important part of our CSR activities, which are aimed at children and young people. Over several years, the “My Finance Coach” initiative was a cooperation partner of zeb. More than 55 zeb consultants were involved and provided primary and secondary schools with basic knowledge on economic and financial affairs. However, since My Finance Coach ceased operations on April 12, 2019, we entered into a new cooperation with JOBLINGE and are thus continuing our long-standing commitment to education and training. 

JOBLINGE is the most successful initiative against youth unemployment in Germany. Seven out of ten Joblings start their an apprenticeship after participating in the program. Important success factors in this context, in addition to the involvement of many companies as providers of opportunities, are the volunteer mentors. As a partner company of JOBLINGE, we offer our colleagues the opportunity to participate in the mentoring program. Mentors listen, coach, support and assist the young people in the program with good advice. For six months, they are involved in the program for up to two hours per week. They are prepared for their tasks with a special training course.

Read an interview with two of our zeb colleagues, Dr. Alexander Stolz und Dr. Niklas Blümke, about their personal experiences here. 

Our business operations in the consulting industry require the use of energy and natural resources. zeb has set itself the target of actively minimizing the negative effects and, wherever possible, to initiate measures to avoid them altogether. 

We continuously strive to improve our ecological efficiency through various steps: economical and ecologically reasonable use of energy, water and paper; green IT and the use of renewable energies; the use of e-Mobility or even the increasing replacement of business trips by audio and video conferences. 

The “lockdown” in 2020 proved how well we were already prepared for the latter. Even though our business model had previously been based on our employees traveling to clients, we were able – at least temporarily – to perform this work remotely without any friction. We believe that this change will continue to have an effect after the end of the coronavirus crisis, helping to reduce our ecological footprint even further. 

zeb has set itself the goal to reduce the consumption of paper in the company and thus to protect the environment in addition to the sustainable purchase of paper from responsibly managed forests (FSC certification). Due to various measures, such as the digitization of invoicing wherever possible, the consumption of paper is continuously decreasing despite corporate growth. As an important success factor, the complete digitization of our employees’ travel expense accounting should be mentioned in this context. Across the entire company, physical or paper receipts are no longer required for reporting travel expenses. Thus, the dispatch of invoices and receipts by mail has also been eliminated.

Additionally, we have started to digitize invoicing wherever legally possible in order to further reduce the consumption of paper. As far as possible, we also avoid sending paper documents by mail. Finally, supplier invoices have also been processed digitally since the beginning of 2020. This has enabled us to reduce paper consumption by almost 20 percent or more than 1,800 kg between 2018 and 2019.

At the start of 2016, the electricity supply was switched to 100 percent green electricity from renewable power sources for all German offices in the zeb group. We were awarded the green electricity certificate by Stadtwerke Münster.