The social and environmental challenges facing the world have become so intense and clear to individuals, businesses, households, companies and governments. Today, investors are broadening their evaluation of potential stocks to sustainability criteria. They recognize that for their investments to make sense, it is crucial to extend the focus beyond earnings. For customers, TV ads are no longer enough. They take further review to identify the most sustainable brand. So, if you haven’t started reporting on sustainability, now is the right time.
If you have a manufacturing organization, it is important to have a good understanding of the ESG sustainability reporting process before you begin. In particular, you should appreciate and correctly apply the following principles.
Responsibility
When you decide to adopt sustainability as part of your manufacturing organization’s strategy, it will require some cultural changes. This is why it must be championed by the top management of the organization. Major decisions must come from the top, especially from the board of directors and senior management.
Management acts as a liaison with all parts of the company. For example, when the board of directors of a manufacturing company makes a decision to change the way different parts communicate, the policy applies to all levels. Depending on the nature of the organization, the company’s leadership may want to delegate the task to a specific team for greater efficiency. If the organization is complex or large, an expert may be needed to assist with the company’s review and implementation of the strategy.
Identify and engage
The first step of the ESG reporting tool is to identify stakeholders and their interests. For example, a publicly traded company might be interested in investors in its shares and customers. Depending on these interests, the company needs to identify the appropriate material issues. Through material analysis, the company can identify the main challenges and opportunities facing its operations.
One, the risks and opportunities become clear, it is now ready to begin. Next, you should engage stakeholders to try to identify good practices in sustainability. Innovation at this point is very important to ensure that the intended objectives are achieved. For example, you may want to link up and work with conservation groups involved in improving genetic diversity for greater societal impact.
Accuracy
Recently, some stakeholders have expressed concern about the accuracy of sustainability reports published by companies. For investors, the goal is to be able to identify the strategies employed by a company and determine whether they are sufficient to secure their investments. Therefore, their sustainability reporting should aim to provide accurate information.
One way to obtain accurate data is to work with sustainability reporting software. The best programs, such as Diginex, are designed to make data collection easy and accurate. Instead of waiting until the end of the year to manually select the data to use, the software allows you to quickly isolate specific information. You can even quickly generate quarterly reports to check progress.
comparability
As you get started with sustainability reporting, the concept of comparability is also very important. This means that once you have created a report, it should be easy to compare with other companies and standards in the industry. To do this, you should identify an appropriate framework, such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) or the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). In addition to comparability, make sure that the report highlights continuity, which means that this year’s efforts should flow easily into what you will do in subsequent periods.
sustainability reporting
is an important component of modern organizational management. Therefore, you should spare no effort to ensure that it is done correctly by making sure you comply with all the principles, especially those we have listed above. Others include timeliness, reliability and accuracy.