Dedicated Sustainability Team

• Dedicated sustainability teams are specialized organizational units that integrate sustainability into software engineering by addressing technical, economic, and human-centric challenges.
• They overcome structural barriers by providing clear guidelines, tailored training, and measurable practices to align top-down goals with bottom-up realities.
• These teams serve as central hubs for expertise, policy formulation, and cross-hierarchical collaboration, ensuring sustainable practices are embedded throughout the organizational lifecycle.

A dedicated sustainability team is an organizational entity—often formalized as a specialized group or governance structure—tasked with institutionalizing, coordinating, and advancing sustainability initiatives across the full range of technical and human concerns relevant to software engineering practice. Such teams function as central drivers for integrating sustainability principles, metrics, and culture within complex, regulated, or high-impact organizational contexts. Their scope includes aligning business and technical strategy, advancing human-centered approaches, developing concrete tools and guidelines, and fostering distributed ownership and accountability for sustainability outcomes (Ghanta et al., 15 Sep 2025). Below, key dimensions are synthesized from research conducted within a financial services company, with contextualization from broader literature.

1. Layered Perceptions of Sustainability

Sustainability in software organizations is perceived differently across organizational strata. Senior management typically construes sustainability as a technical and economic challenge, emphasizing infrastructural resilience (e.g., cloud migration for data durability and on-demand scalability) and cost efficiency as sustainability levers. These priorities are often situated within compliance frameworks and business continuity objectives. By contrast, developers primarily articulate sustainability in terms of human factors, such as sustainable workload management and stress mitigation. This population expresses concerns about process inefficiencies, chronic overwork, and lack of mechanisms for preserving productivity and well-being during periods of intensive delivery pressure or rapid change. The resulting divergence in sustainability narratives reflects the tension between top-down strategic imperatives and bottom-up experiential realities, underscoring the necessity for mediation and translation between these perspectives (Ghanta et al., 15 Sep 2025).

2. Barriers to Adoption and Structural Challenges

Adoption of sustainable software engineering (SSE) practices is hampered by internal and structural barriers that align with organizational hierarchy and functional silos. Notable impediments include:

• Low awareness and insufficient training on SSE concepts among both management and technical staff.
• Operational inefficiencies stemming from legacy systems, poor documentation, and inter-team dependencies, which create additional workload and diminish the capacity for sustainability-related tasks.
• Short-term business priorities that deprioritize long-term sustainability, leading to perceptions of SSE as a “nice-to-have” buffered by the performance-driven culture of the financial sector.

Table 1 summarizes common barriers and their manifestations by role:

Role	Key Barriers
Management	Reconciling short-term goals with sustainable investment; lack of actionable frameworks
Developers	Overwork, stress, lack of agency, dependency delays, perceived futility of sustainability

Interventions must account for these differentiated contexts to enable meaningful, context-sensitive practice transformation (Ghanta et al., 15 Sep 2025).

3. Purpose and Structure of the Dedicated Sustainability Team

A dedicated sustainability team is conceptualized as a specialized internal group—analogous to established security governance structures—entrusted with leadership and institutional memory for SSE. Its responsibilities, as described in both direct participant feedback and analogical reasoning, include:

• Providing authoritative guidance on sustainable software engineering policies, practices, and metrics.
• Filling expertise and knowledge gaps across the organization by acting as a center of excellence.
• Developing and maintaining organizational SSE measurement infrastructure, including technical indices (e.g., SSE_Index = f(Technical Efficiency, Workload Sustainability, Process Automation, Environmental Impact)) and domain-specific guidelines.
• Serving as a nexus for communication, training, and knowledge dissemination, in turn reducing the burden on individual developers and middle managers (Ghanta et al., 15 Sep 2025).

At the same time, a central risk is the propagation of a “delegation mindset,” where responsibility for sustainability is perceived to rest solely with the specialist team. This suggests a hybrid model, with both central leadership and distributed ownership (e.g., “sustainability champions” within software teams), is optimal for impact and legitimacy.

4. Implementation Strategies and Contextualization

Effective integration of sustainability into the software engineering lifecycle requires co-design of interventions through structured dialogue between management and practitioners. Recommended strategies include:

• Embedding SSE practices into the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) via agile methodologies, such as incorporating sustainability checkpoints into iterative planning and retrospectives.
• Initiating cross-hierarchical workshops for collaborative development of context-sensitive metrics, standards, and performance indicators tailored to sectoral needs and compliance requirements.
• Customizing SSE initiatives to sectoral constraints; for the financial domain, this includes prioritizing data compliance, auditing, and confidentiality in the design and execution of sustainability practices.

These strategies ensure that practices align with both regulatory obligations and practical developer needs, preventing the imposition of generic or ill-fitting frameworks that risk disengagement or inefficacy (Ghanta et al., 15 Sep 2025).

5. Addressing Human-Centric Factors

Human sustainability—workload management, stress reduction, and well-being—is markedly foregrounded in developer narratives. Chronic overwork and lack of agency are persistent risks to both individual and team-level sustainability. The dedicated sustainability team’s remit should explicitly include:

• Development and dissemination of targeted training on workload optimization, sustainable pacing, and self-management.
• Implementation of guidelines for collaborative inter-team work, documentation standards, and communication protocols to reduce operational inefficiencies.
• Acting as an accessible hub for resources and support in managing well-being, thus mitigating the managerial burden on middle layers.

A plausible implication is that such measures not only support retention and performance but also augment the effectiveness and credibility of top-down sustainability initiatives across the organization (Ghanta et al., 15 Sep 2025).

6. Navigating Organizational Skepticism and Promoting Buy-In

Internal skepticism—especially among developers—often frames sustainability initiatives as public relations strategies (“greenwashing”) with questionable authenticity. Overcoming this skepticism requires:

• Transparent, bottom-up participatory processes in planning, implementing, and evaluating SSE initiatives.
• Appointment of sustainability champions embedded within technical teams to mediate between central strategies and operational concerns.
• Clear articulation and demonstration of both business value and personal benefit accruing from sustainable practices.
• Use of accessible and empirically meaningful metrics to support progress monitoring and impact attribution.

These approaches help align top-down aspirations with bottom-up realities, building shared ownership and reducing resistance (Ghanta et al., 15 Sep 2025).

7. Synthesis and Outlook

The establishment and effective operation of a dedicated sustainability team in a domain such as financial services necessitate awareness of—and tailored responses to—the differing perceptions, needs, and operational realities across the organization. While such a team can serve as a focal driver, repository of knowledge, and policy authority, its effectiveness is maximized when embedded within a distributed structure of sustainability champions and co-designed interventions. Alignment with regulatory compliance and domain-specific demands, along with transparent communication and credible metrics, is central to reconciling the technical, economic, and human-centric dimensions of sustainability. This organizational architecture provides a roadmap for bridging aspirational sustainability goals with actionable, implementable practices in complex, high-stakes software engineering contexts (Ghanta et al., 15 Sep 2025).