The CTO of a climate-tech company shares a 3-part approach to technology that can improve employee recruitment and performance

• Commons, formerly Joro, is a climate-tech company that allows users to track their carbon footprint.
• CTO Nick Reavill explained why environment-focused companies should use tech deliberately to grow.
• This article is part of "Tech Leadership Playbook," a series that shares advice from the most innovative tech execs.

When Commons, formerly known as Joro, launched in 2020, its goal was to help consumers better understand their personal carbon footprints by analyzing their purchases. 

By connecting a bank account or credit card to the Commons app, users could see how their daily expenses convert to kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents. In less than two years, Commons enabled users to lower their emissions by 20% and save an average of $200 a month by reevaluating their financial decisions. 

Since relaunching as Commons in March, the company rolled out a new design, feature updates, and the ability to connect with others to share progress.

As Commons continues to grow, the company's chief technology officer, Nick Reavill, is leaning on his tenure as the engineering director of Stitch Fix, the billion-dollar e-commerce clothing company, to inform his decision-making when using technology to enhance internal workflows.

"Your use of technology is provisional," he told Insider. "It should be serving your needs as they change and as you grow. When the business changes, your use of technology should change as well."

Reavill offered three ways technology leaders can transform how their companies operate and spearhead industrial change.

1. Consider using standard technology as a recruiting tool

Reavill said Commons uses standard technology externally, in its consumer-facing applications, but also internally as a means of attracting top talent. 

"The technologies we specifically use to achieve our aims of the company are deliberately fairly standard because that helps with recruiting, and a lot of people know those technologies," Reavill said.

Since the pandemic, the way we all work has been drastically altered, and 35% of US-based employees are now working from home full-time. Although some CEOs are skeptical about remote work, Reavill believes more tech leaders should embrace it. 

Because Commons uses technology that enables remote work, "the pool of people we could hire was much bigger, and I found that you can often find people who are very undervalued," Reavill said. By embracing standardized technology across your organization, he added, it becomes simpler to work with skilled professionals across varying time zones.

"I like using standard technologies that don't have a large overhead, that are well-understood, where you can easily hire people anywhere who can work in them," he added.

2. Only introduce new technology — and necessary costs — when it aligns with your company's values

"There's a sort of common thing you see with software engineers, and I was like this when I was early in my career: They're very excited about new technologies and wanting to try out new things," Reavill said. "I very deliberately try to avoid introducing those into the company, because they add on unnecessary cost, unnecessary complexity and not necessarily, for what we're trying to achieve, a huge benefit." 

Some companies in the climate-tech space are at the forefront of cutting-edge technology. And while a business working on carbon capture might need to introduce new tools frequently, for a value-driven company like Commons, that's not at the top of the to-do list. 

"I see my job as a CTO as to think about how we actually move quickly and take the goals of the business, the needs of our users, and by using standard technology, create exactly the right tools, the right products for those people," Reavill said.  

Reavill does this by keeping up to date with new developments in the company's current use of data analysis and scheduling monthly meetings with his team to routinely reassess their processes.

3. Know when to bring in complex technological tools internally

Some tech leaders are quick to look toward new tools to inspire company-wide growth. But that can be a big mistake.

The main thing stopping companies in the environmental industry from quickly progressing isn't technology, "because we have a lot of powerful technology," Reavill said. "It's more about policy and access to funding or even a sort of educational understanding amongst the general public."

While an educational divide among consumers could be addressed using marketing, for climate-focused organizations, it's key to understand the issue of the environment is a society-wide problem, and it may take time to bridge the gap, he added.

But Reavill noted that when it's time to introduce new technology, the signs will be clear. "When things get bigger, and things become much more complex, you have to introduce more powerful and, in some ways, more constraining tools," Reavill said. "Because it can be too difficult to train an 800-person company on how to use a particular spreadsheet."

A common sign of internal strain is when training new employees on standard technology tools becomes a burden. "The thing about general tools is that it's easy to make mistakes because they're not forcing you to work in a certain way," Reavill said.

He continued: "So once you reach the point where you see lots of mistakes or the training cost is very high, switching to a more specific, powerful tool which forces you to work in a certain way is then worth it because you're not having to worry about the mistakes that people can make with this general tool."

Overall, Reavill said, technology is a tool. If you can't explain what good it will do for the organization's consumers or business practices, you need to take a step back. 

"Don't let technology be the master of your business," he said. "Make sure that you are using it to serve your purposes, and before you add a new technology, think about what is the problem you're trying to solve, and then look for a technology that will help you solve that problem. And don't be nervous to do an experiment and see how it works."