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Drew Wilkinson is the poster boy for workplace climate activism. In fact, it’s likely you’ve read about him before. You know, the former punk rocker who started working for Microsoft and went on to build an employee climate group numbering 10,000? While Drew no longer works for the biggest tech company in the world, he has spent the last year sharing everything he learned at Microsoft with other employees. The aim? “To make sustainability part of everyone’s job,” he says.
“I’m trying to apply what I saw work at Microsoft,” Drew says from his home in Seattle. “There are employees in most companies, big or small, that are concerned about climate change. And if they can take advantage of their employer's resources, they can have a much bigger impact than anything they could do as an individual, voter or consumer.”
A punk rock education
Drew grew up in Arizona. As a kid, his days were spent riding his bike, catching lizards and doing “desert rat stuff”. Watching the spaces around him transform or be bulldozed for building developments planted the seeds for an emerging environmental consciousness, but it was picking up a guitar age 14 that really kick-started his journey. “Punk, by its very nature, is a very political music scene,” he reflects. “So in my teens, I started learning about animal rights, feminism and all kinds of -isms.” And it was here, deeply embedded in a passionately do-it-yourself music scene, Drew began to develop the skills that would eventually help drive his work inside of Microsoft.
“In the punk scene, the only way something was going to happen was if you did it yourself. That DIY ethos definitely followed me through every part of my life, and especially into my career,” he says. “A big part of this work is believing that you can do something that has never been done before, or might be unconventional, or a little controversial. That spirit was ingrained in me.”
Harnessing the power of a trillion dollar company
After a stint aboard a ship with Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and working for a handful of small NGOs, Drew landed a job as a paralegal in Microsoft. He describes the chances of this happening as lightning striking, and the culture shock was big. Drew went from working in tiny teams where every paperclip counted, to a worksite bustling with 50,000 employees, shuffled via private fleets between the 100 or so buildings on site.
While it took him a moment to adjust, it wasn’t long until Drew identified the potential of working for a company of this size. Just imagine how a trillion dollar company could progress climate action?
“Sustainability should be part of everybody's job.
What happened next is pretty well documented. Alongside his colleague Holly Beale, Drew started “small”. Identifying that Microsoft had a waste problem, the pair petitioned for meetings with management to share ideas and strategies. This eventually resulted in the company building its first ever waste-free cafeteria. And from there things really snowballed. Over five years of hard work, set-backs and repeatedly being told “no”, he and Beale shifted the paradigm of climate action at Microsoft by building a 10,000-strong sustainability community of Microsoft employees across the world. his would lead to the company making huge changes and setting ambitious climate targets, including the goal to become carbon negative by 2030.
Why Microsoft will never be the same
For all the tangible things that they did, Drew says there was one key achievement that made it all possible: “We changed the paradigm of who got to work on sustainability. Before the existence of the community, the only people that got to work on sustainability were the people that had it in their job title,” he explains. When he started working at Microsoft in 2016, in a company of roughly 200,000 employees, only around five had sustainability jobs.
“The biggest challenge we faced was changing the perception that just because you don't have sustainability in your job title, or aren't a subject matter expert, doesn't mean that you can't work on sustainability, be able to make a meaningful contribution, or come up with things that fully trained professionals would never think of.”
And it didn't happen overnight.
“That took many, many years of hard work, good old-fashioned organising, relationship management, persuasion and community building,” he says. “But that was the hardest part and the biggest success because I think we did that. And that is forever changed at Microsoft, the ultimate success is the size of the community.”
Every employee can be a sustainability expert
This idea sits at the heart of all of Drew’s work now. After losing his job in 2023, following company-wide layoffs, he decided to continue the work he had begun on a larger stage. Drew started a consultancy company and now spends his time talking to other employers and employees about the worth of green-skilling their entire workforce.
“Sustainability should be part of everybody's job. It should not just be a piece of somebody's job, or an operational thing that one tiny under-resourced team is responsible for. It should be a cultural value that every employee feels not only responsible for, but empowered to contribute to,” he says.
Teaching courage
Drew is more determined than ever to show how effective workplace climate action is. What does this look like? Ensuring people at the top see the value in a green-skilled workforce, and simultaneously emboldening employees with the skills needed to make change. This way you are setting up a situation where employer and employee can meet in the middle, joining forces to make change.
“The bottom-up stuff is really important because I want to grow climate leaders and climate activists in all the companies, and I don't want there to be a barrier for entry to that,” says Drew. “That's why in addition to the corporate consulting, I do things like free webinars on my blog and instructional videos. I'm trying to make as much of that information and content freely available as possible.”
Why?
“So that we help create a movement of climate literate and articulate people in every company, who will have enough knowledge and courage to discern the difference between greenwashing and real action, and then be able to actually hold their employer responsible for that.”
Drew Wilkinson provides consulting services for employee engagement, helping organisations make sustainability part of everybody's job. Learn more on his website or connect with him on LinkedIn.
Inspired by Drew's story? Register for the next WorkforClimate Academy to kickstart your climate action journey.
