Everyone makes sustainability pledges:
But businesses that are progressing in their ability to run sustainably are taking some important steps.
1. Sustainability leadership starts with the CEO or Board and then transitions to an expert
Sustainability for a business may start out as a project but to be successful it has to be a transformation. It makes sense to have the CEO or the Board in charge of sustainability at the very start of the journey, to champion the issue and bring creditability to driving early-stage change as a growth strategy. Leading your sustainability strategy from the top will mean you are more likely to be motivated by revenue and profit opportunities.
BUT……. This isn’t sustainable in the long term given all the other pressures on the leadership team, to continue the transformation companies look to delegate leadership to a chief sustainability officer.
Assigning leadership for sustainability transformation to the expert in charge of sustainability and spreading accountability across the business is the next step. Although the CEO or Board don’t need to be the face of it they still need to be the chief motivators, setting the strategy and company purpose.
Companies that have been collecting data for more than two years are 73% more likely to have a Chief Sustainability Officer in charge of setting sustainability strategy
73%More likely to have a Chief Sustainability Officer
2. Use sustainability data for strategic and operational decision making
A critical step is to use the sustainability data collected for both strategic and operational decision-making. Collecting quality data can be difficult and using that data to make business decisions is a big shift. But that’s how you meet those sustainability pledges and how you get everyone in the business to incorporate sustainability into their thinking and actions.
When you have a lot of reliable data, you gain a better understanding about what needs to be measured and how to improve.
Businesses that use sustainability data to a strong degree in decision-making have a much higher degree of complete satisfaction with the quality of their data (45%) than everyone else (less than 10%).
3. Use improvements in data collection
The level of confidence in sustainability data is shifting with access to virtually unlimited cloud storage and databases that compute in near real time, along with the progress of the Internet of Things and AI allowing data to be gathered from across a business – sustainability data can be reached across the organisation at speed and with confidence.
4. Find a connection to financial results
The mandates that heavily regulated industries like energy, chemicals, etc have been working with for decades are coming soon to a balance sheet near you. Even if you believe that your business has a relatively clean operation, you’re not out of the woods you could just be about to enter them. Your suppliers’ emissions could matter as much to your financial results in a while here in Australia as regulators in the US and Europe are moving towards incorporating emissions from a company’s dirtiest suppliers (like fuel and logistics) into emission totals.
