The linkages between corporate sustainability and society are well established. As organisations continue to integrate and align sustainability with their purpose, there remains a need to identify an approach that helps them achieve this goal.
The approach should be easy to implement by even the smallest organisations and yet comprehensive enough to guide how sustainability is applied across the organisation.
While there are numerous questions organisations must answer, four stand out when demystifying sustainability within an organisation.
The first question is ‘What is the strategic imperative for sustainability?’ This question gets to the heart of why sustainability matters in the corporate context today and what it aims to deliver. It involves an organisation’s value-creation approach and how non-financial factors affect the financial. Organisations must have clarity on this fundamental aspect of sustainability and its impact on future viability.
The second question is ‘How is sustainability changing the competitive landscape within their industry?’ To remain relevant and competitive over time, sustainability needs to be integrated into strategy execution. Understanding how sustainability enables growth, efficiency, and better risk management is the key to developing the business case for sustainability across the organisation.
Taking a business case lens to sustainability demonstrates to stakeholders, particularly shareholders, that financial performance will not be compromised but rather enhanced by sustainability. This second question will also help organisations identify their material sustainability topics.
The third question to consider is ‘What are the roles and responsibilities?’ This question will help to define the roles of each function across the organisation regarding the ‘what’ and ‘how’ for sustainability implementation.
It is where policies, frameworks, baselining and other execution tasks take place. Aim to translate sustainability plans into business-as-usual across their teams, such as risk, strategy, internal audit, product innovation, marketing, investor relations, and digital, among others.
The fourth question for organisations is ‘what does reporting mean for the organisation?’ It requires organisations to develop a data strategy for information to be reported, including the identified reporting framework, systems and processes required.
In addition, organisations should have in place the internal assurance systems to enhance the reliability of sustainability-related disclosures.
Organisations can move from idea to action by thinking through these four questions.
Akinyemi Awodumila is a Partner at PwC Kenya. He is an author who writes and speaks widely on corporate reporting topics
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