Why you aren't getting anywhere with ESG
Okay, so you have made a sustainability strategy. And you have conducted your first, second or maybe even third sustainability report.
But every year, when you start creating the report, you face the same reality.
Nothing’s really happening…
Your datapoints have not changed as much as you’ve hoped, and you have not reached as many goals as you wanted to.
What’s going on?
You have communicated time and time again that sustainability is very important to you, and you have a report and a strategy to show it.
Most likely, you are making one of the most common and recurring mistakes in sustainability implementation.
Check our non-exhaustive list below to find out why you aren’t getting anywhere with ESG:
You have not assigned any new roles.
… or you have given all the responsibility to one employee who already have a desk full of other important tasks.
You are not measuring employees on their ESG performance.
You have not made it clear what needs to be achieved by who and by when.
You only focus on ESG when you want to communicate about it (not cool!)
You have put all your time and energy into one huge project, mostly for communication purposes.
You do not talk about the importance of ESG in a business context within your company. In fact, it is more often talked about as some annoying thing you have to deal with.
You have not done anything to make sure employees have the tools and knowledge they need to perform as you hope they do.
You do not have a system for collecting data continuously, so you only know how things are going once a year when making your report.
You have not included ESG in your budget.
You have not made sure the responsible employees have the time to manage a new area of responsibilities alongside their other tasks.
You have not involved your partners and supply chain in your work.
You have not made an action plan for realising your sustainability strategy.
So, how many of these are you guilty of?