At Okta, we live by our core values: love our customers, act with integrity, never stop innovating, be transparent, and empower our people. We put these into practice with our co-founder led weekly All Hands meetings and by giving back to our communities — we took the 1% Pledge prior to our IPO, offer frequent employee volunteering opportunities, and as the COVID-19 pandemic was unfolding, we devoted our resources to supporting those in need. We also made a swift decision to offer Okta for Emergency Remote Work to companies struggling to enable their teams to work from home. We put our values to work no matter what’s going on in the world and no matter what we’re working on. And now, we're taking the next step in putting these values to work with the launch of our environmental, social and governance (ESG) program.
We believe that Okta has a long-term responsibility to maximize benefits to society, the environment, and our stakeholders, including our employees, customers, shareholders and communities. We believe that for our company to be successful in the long-term, we must take into account the success of all our key stakeholders. Thus, over the past few months, we’ve been evaluating the impact of our business operations on these stakeholders. These efforts led to the launch of the first phase of our ESG program this month.
We worked with external experts and internal stakeholders to help define our most material issues — those that are most relevant to both our business and our stakeholders. We organized our top issues into three categories: protecting our customers, investing in our people, and supporting our communities. This is a solid start and we’re committed to building on the program from here.
Protecting Our Customers: Protecting individuals’ privacy is at the foundation of everything we do and is pivotal to our customers trusting us as their identity provider. We built the Okta Identity Cloud to be the world’s most secure and reliable identity platform because we know that what we do is so critical to our customers’ success.
Investing in Our People: Okta wouldn’t be Okta without our team. That’s why investing in our people is and will always be a priority for us. We do this in a number of ways, including through our workforce development efforts, diversity, inclusion and belonging initiatives, and benefits program. We also support our employees by providing flexibility in where and how they work. We’ve introduced our Dynamic Work framework last year, which enables our employees to work from anywhere, while providing comparable benefits, flexible schedules, and work environments and experiences, regardless of their location.
Supporting Our Communities: Since we founded Okta over a decade ago, we’ve been proud of our social impact work and the philanthropic contributions we’ve made through Okta for Good and our 1% Pledge. We are committed to giving back to the communities in which we live and work, and at Oktane20 Live, we furthered that commitment by announcing $10 million in new philanthropic funding over the next three years, the majority of which will support the technology needs of nonprofits. This commitment represents the next era of our giving — and it comes at a time when so many organizations face unimaginable strain due to the global pandemic.
We are also committed to reducing the greenhouse gas emissions of our operations by sourcing renewable energy and implementing efficiency projects, and we actively select office sites that are easily accessible by public transit. Our Dynamic Work framework will also reduce the negative environmental impacts of commuting.
We are at the early stages of our ESG journey, and the framework we’ve developed is our commitment to building a more secure, liveable, sustainable, and generous future. We look forward to bringing you along with us as we continue on this journey and value any feedback you might have along the way.
To learn more about our ESG framework and efforts, visit our social and environmental responsibility webpage here.
