Sustainability success starts with employee engagement at all levels of your organization.
It’s stunning how quickly expectations can change.
A few years ago, for most organizations, ESG reports were mere “nice-to-haves”. Today, on the other hand, these disclosures are demanded—by investors, regulators, and increasingly, by consumers. The question for many companies now is how to drive a strong ESG strategy. They know that requests for these reports are coming and a plan is needed to both promote sustainability initiatives and boost their ESG scores.
There are multiple ways to go about this, but a great place to start is by creating a sustainability committee. Here, we’ll explain what this entails and we’ll offer a few ideas on how to leverage this in-house team to optimize the processes required for ESG reporting. Specifically, we’ll discuss the answers to these questions:
If you’re at the helm of a sustainability program and ready to take it to the next level, here’s a look at what you can do now to set your organization up for success.
While most EHS professionals understand why it’s important to have a well-developed ESG strategy, the need for a sustainability committee may be less obvious. When a typical workday is already packed with meetings, why would anyone assume that gathering another group is a good idea?
The 3-part answer has everything to do with what this team can accomplish.
This cross-functional team, with its variety of perspectives, represents your organization, and as it promotes and facilitates sustainability initiatives, it can ensure they’re always in the best interest of the business and its stakeholders – from customers to employees to investors.
When a diverse group of stakeholders gets together in one room, the ideas that they’ll generate (and inevitably refine) shouldn’t be underestimated. Furthermore, prospective hires want to work at companies where this culture is the norm. They expect sustainability to be a priority, and they expect to see teams that can get the job done.
With a dedicated group focused on finding ways to cut energy use, for example, your organization will benefit from lower operating costs, not to mention potential gains from better risk management. And when it comes to spreading the word about your work? Just think about the fodder a productive sustainability committee might provide your organization’s marketing department.
Creating a sustainability committee is one thing, but for this group to get results, it must have buy-in from the larger workforce.
One approach favored by an increasing number of companies involves following the recommendations outlined in a now often cited article from the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Among other things, the story’s authors noted, that there are four key steps organizations can take to drive employee participation and engagement.
It takes dedicated people and relentless collaboration to make an organization more sustainable but finding the right reporting technology can elevate your ESG management and strategies even further. To drive efficiencies in program management and to facilitate everything from third-party auditing to data collection and report generation, most organizations rely on technologies designed specifically for these purposes.
The biggest advantage of deploying ESG technologies to further an organization’s sustainability goals is in how it can create a single source of truth for data from multiple systems. In the absence of such a tool, gathering data from across the enterprise can be a labor-intensive and error-prone process. But with the right software in place, you have the efficiencies that come with automation and the ability to turn that data into useful information.
ESG software can help an organization:
In the end, living up to expectations means developing an ESG strategy that works for your organization and your employees. Creating a sustainability committee will help you put that strategy in motion, while technology will help you keep it on track.