Driving a sustainable business.
Sustainability is, with good cause, a hot C-level topic. And your ability to be sustainable is increasingly important to those you do business with.
In fact, Deloitte reports that 46% of organisations have begun requiring business partners across their supply chain/value chain to meet specific sustainability criteria. And according to Forbes, 88% of consumers say they will be more loyal to a company that supports social or environmental issues.
As COO, accessing and compiling the information required for sustainability reporting likely falls under your remit. This could include the impact on your energy and water consumption if you move to an eco-friendly building, the amount of business and everyday commute travel, supply chain transportation costs, company vehicles, recycling initiatives, employee wellbeing, and much more.
Even if you’ve not already begun this process, we’re sure you can well imagine how hard it’s going to be to find and extract the wide range of information you need just as a sustainability starting point - and then transform it into usable information to empower improvement within the business. And it often means converting non-financial information into financial information to prove the bottom-line value of change.
The transition to being a sustainable business requires access to accurate data as a minimum starting point – and this data can be both diverse and non-monetised – from employee information to community demographics, carbon reporting, environmental parameters related to air, water, soil, noise, climate change, and biodiversity, to financial data.
It’s fair to say that sustainability reporting is a challenging area for many businesses and often requires specialist help and knowledge. This isn’t helped by constantly changing metrics as information about environmental impacts changes, and reporting standards are in flux. All of which compounds the difficulty of keeping up with data management and meaningful reporting.
Yet, despite the complexities involved, it’s hard to say ‘no’ to the drive or the directive to become a (more) sustainable business. And with Stanford Social Innovation Review saying that over 90% of CEOs state that sustainability is important to their company’s success, you’re not alone in the ‘get it done’ spotlight.
None of it is easy – but it’s the ‘how to get it done’ that poses the most significant hurdle – beginning with establishing what data you need and how you can access it. And finding someone with the know-how and capability to make it happen?
We just so happen to have a full-time sustainability reporting consultant on our team. So perhaps contacting us is an easier place to start?
Nel Botha
Practice Manager - Planning & Analytics - Fusion5