Employee engagement Feature story Empowering our global workforce We recognize that our employees are the most important asset and resource in advancing innovation in sustainability and are creating opportunities for them to contribute to our efforts. Empowering our global workforce is the center of our sustainability strategy. At Microsoft, empowering our global workforce is the center of our sustainability strategy. Both Microsoft and LinkedIn have employee communities who drive bottom-up sustainability initiatives to educate, inspire, and activate every employee to advance the company’s sustainability goals. The Microsoft Sustainability Connected Community is an employee-led group of 5,000 members and 32 regional chapters whose mission is to make sustainability part of everybody’s job. The LinkedIn Go Green sustainability engagement program includes one out of every eight employees and its 26 chapters are focused on empowering employees to take green action at home, in the office, and in their communities. Both groups engage employees on our sustainability commitments while using Microsoft and LinkedIn technology to innovate real-world solutions to the climate crisis through the following activities. Ecochallenges Microsoft and LinkedIn employees participated in virtual Ecochallenges for three weeks around Earth Day 2021 to gamify personal sustainability. Seven thousand people prepared 31,000 meatless or vegan meals, saved 197,000 pounds of CO 2 , diverted 227,000 plastic containers and bottles from landfill, saved 392,000 gallons of water, and spent 239,000 minutes learning about sustainability. Run an ecochallenge to give your employees the opportunity to learn and practice habits that support them on their personal sustainability journey. Find out more at Ecochallenge.org Hack for sustainability Microsoft employees self-organize into working groups all year long and “hack for sustainability” by partnering with each other to create innovative solutions to real- world environmental challenges. In 2020, Microsoft had 125 projects with 879 participants, and 93 percent of participants indicated their interest in continuing the work beyond the Hackathon. One award-winning project from the Microsoft Global Hackathon, Soil as a Service, created a way to lower the cost of measuring organic carbon in soil using a sensor hooked up to Microsoft Azure IoT. This innovative solution lowers the cost of measurement significantly, incentivizing farmers to change their land management practices and helping nascent carbon marketplaces to quantify their impact. The project has been picked up by a business group for further research and exploration. Ongoing sustainability ideating and hacking The Microsoft Garage provides a platform for hackathons and ideathons all year long, including our month-long Sustainability Ideathon for Earth Day 2021 and the year-round Sustainability program using our HackBox platform for employees to collect ideas, share concepts, create projects, form teams, and inspire colleagues globally to participate in Microsoft’s sustainability journey. Employee-led sustainability projects Employees from every facet of Microsoft and LinkedIn are empowered to lead collaborative cross-company sustainability projects at any time. This year, our platform has facilitated 200 projects from more than 1,000 employee “hackers,” with projects ranging from digital foresting, to smart bird feeders, to building software that will help retrofit the world’s coal power plant fleet with modular nuclear reactors. 9