Novartis : the Business Case for Sustainability
At a glance
At Novartis, Climate Fresk has helped employees connect climate change with their day-to-day work and identify opportunities to make sustainability more tangible. What began as a bottom-up initiative has reached hundreds of colleagues, with examples showing how individual employees can challenge established practices, reduce waste and uncover business benefits.
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The Challenge
How can a large organisation turn climate awareness into action across teams and departments? At Novartis, Climate Fresk offered employees a shared understanding of climate change and a starting point for exploring what it means in their own roles. The next challenge was to carry that motivation beyond the workshop: connecting ideas to business decisions, overcoming resistance to change and ensuring that promising initiatives receive follow-up.
Competing work demands can make it difficult for employees to commit to three-hour workshops, while newly trained facilitators may need additional support to gain confidence. Measuring the longer-term impact of workshops also remains a work in progress.
The Solution
Empowering employees to take initiative
Climate Fresk was introduced through individual employees rather than a top-down mandate. This bottom-up approach helped colleagues bring others on board and build momentum across teams.
As participation grew, the initiative reached more than 500 people in Basel Development, against an initial target of 200 for 2025. In one clinical operations unit responsible for packaging medication kits, participation exceeded 50%.
Connecting awareness with practical decisions
The value of the workshops became tangible when an employee working on study design questioned an established approach that was creating unnecessary waste. Despite initial resistance, she persisted in changing the process, enabling substantial savings.
The experience illustrates how climate awareness can help employees spot opportunities that might otherwise go unchallenged, and how environmental and business benefits can reinforce one another.
Making follow-up part of the process
The workshops are a starting point, not an end in themselves. The second-generation Climate Fresk format helps participants move from ideas towards more concrete project proposals, identifying the team, support needed, obstacles and next steps.
Key Results
Key Results
- 500+ participants in Climate Fresk in Basel Development, exceeding the initial target of 200 for 2025.
- A concrete example of employee-led change: one revised study-design decision reportedly enabled savings in the hundreds of thousands of CHF.
- A pathway from awareness to implementation: action planning and follow-up can help turn workshop motivation into initiatives with organisational relevance.
- Among their broader sustainability projects, a Novartis clinical-supply optimisation initiative also reduced annual shipments from around 86,000 to fewer than 40,000, with reported annual savings of around 10 million CHF.
- This also helped inform a self-funding model under which up to 50% of financial savings from sustainability initiatives can be reinvested in further activities.