In 2025, offering competitive salaries and career growth alone is no longer enough for companies to engage employees and attract job applicants.
Young workers are now looking beyond the job description. They seek to join organizations that have a clear commitment to sustainability, environmental responsibility, and community impact.
In an interview with Interaksyon, Rumi Mitra, Corporate Responsibility Leader of global delivery network firm EY Global Delivery Services (GDS), said sustainability and advocacy efforts are important to Filipino workers—and have become the main indicators of employee engagement and retention.
Mitra said this is especially true for Filipino Gen Z workers. Gen Z is the generation of people born between 1995 and 2009.
“It is the trend. They are actually very environment-conscious,” Mitra said of young Filipino employees.
Mitra noted that EY GDS internal surveys also indicate that Gen Z employees “want to work with brands that are sustainability conscious.”
“They want to work with a company that has a clear goal called
out by the organization. They want to work with a company with clear purpose towards climate and the environment,” she further explained
Mitra explained that this matters to young Filipino workers because they believe “climate change is the most defining issue of our time.
“So employees now look at how the organization they work for makes a difference. They ask, how can we be a responsible business? How do we reduce our own carbon footprint in the environment?” she added.
According to the World Weather Attribution group report published last month, climate change is making the Philippines more vulnerable to tropical cyclones, with the formation of four typhoons in the country in November 2024 likely the result of global temperature rise.
READ: Climate change putting Philippines at double risk of typhoons, scientists say
This Gen Z mindset affects the minute aspects of the Filipino employee’s work life, according to Nitin Dhavale, Philippines Location Leader of EY GDS.
“Even when you look for offices, people are wanting to see what kind of workplaces we are choosing,” Dhavale said.
Sky farms, skill building
This consciousness among the Filipino workforce informs the sustainability and advocacy efforts of EY GDS—not only to engage its employees but also to directly affect change in the country.
One of its flagship sustainability programs among EY GDS employees is its “sky farms.”
Every month, around 20 to 30 employees plant seeds of hydroponic vegetables—vegetables one can plant and grow without soil—atop certain buildings in Taguig City (where the EY GDS office is also located).
Participants of the program are employees who are celebrating their birthdays that month. The program is done in partnership with Farmtop, a social enterprise that promotes urban agriculture.
“Employees love it because it sort of nudges them to think about sustainability. It’s an opportunity to do something hands-on. So, you know, you’re nurturing the growth,” Mitra said.
The produce yielded from the sky farm is sold to Farmtop’s partner retailers, the proceeds of which go to funding their scholarship programs with partner schools.
EY GDS Philippines—with the help of its 2,500-strong workforce—has also planted over 11,000 trees in urban and rural areas all over the country in the past two years. The firm also partnered with the World Wide Fund for Nature Philippines for coastal cleanups and mangrove planting to support fishing communities.
Mitra said that apart from encouraging employees to support sustainability efforts, it is also important to initiate action. Hence, they “curate and create opportunities where employees get to see environmental action on [the] ground and they are able to really create
an action.”
“We get them into projects that are real-time environmental projects so that they can participate and get a better sense of things and they can feel that they are directly contributing to environmental action,” Mitra said.
Aside from environmental projects, Mitra said EY GDS is also involved with educational programs, including upskilling Filipino students, teaching them in specific areas such as AI, digital literacy, and cyber security.
They are also involved in “model interaction,” a program where EY GDS employees get to interact with students from all over the country to do extensive coaching and mentoring “so that the students get an opportunity to see what is on the other side,” Mitra said.
For this, the firm teamed up with the Department of Education.
“In the Philippines, in order to achieve any objective, we want our people to lead rather than we bringing the mandate,” Dhavale explained the Filipino employee engagement with their programs.