Your sustainability statement is primarily meant to inspire your employees and business, not to impress an external audience. Your customers, stakeholders and investors should be motivated and supportive by the pro-sustainability stance you are adopting. A strong sustainability statement should clearly define how sustainability is incorporated within the business’s strategic road map and priorities, the tangible results you are in the process of, or have achieved, and ……finally, their alignment with business growth or future-fit resilience. Far too many sustainability strategies are written as external-facing PR statements designed to ‘resonate’ or ‘reverberate’ externally. In the worst cases, they are not even the words of the senior leadership team but have been bought in or plagiarized from other organisations statements.
When an organisation’s leadership team takes the bold decision to adopt a more sustainable business stance, they often do so for a variety of reasons
Three models but the first two approaches are short-term and illusionary, whilst the last approach holds out the greatest opportunity for corporate change and a higher sense of responsible leadership development.
It is important to keep in mind that sustainability in business is driven by your organisation’s desire to reduce its unsustainable footprint, to remain competitive in its marketplace and to retain organisational agility that supports innovation, promotes a strong organisational culture, and provides a future-fit mechanism for appraising intangible risks and emerging trends.
Tip 1: A good sustainability statement must reflect the issues that an organisation faces across the spectrum of environmental and social governance risks (ESG) or any emerging ethical issues, and prioritises future action against those with the greatest potential for disrumption, resilience, reputation, impact on people and their environments, and ethical liability.
Thus the process of becoming a more sustainable organisation or business starts with the identification and internal acceptance that a number of working practices or corporate behaviours are now unsustainable, require change or breach ESG norms. These are the material priorities that form the foundation for your subsequent work in preparing a sustainability statement. In real terms it provides the organization (and later by default its stakeholders) with an acceptance of what is most significant to future business growth and what your organisation plans to do to improve its pro-sustainability progress, whilst safeguarding the natural world and the social responsibilities it interacts with during the course of its operations, services or product production.
Tip 2: very few businesses start from scratch, and most have already a degree of internal environmental and social governance, EMS or compliance processes.
In most cases, your company already has an overarching mission statement. The sustainability statement is a supplement – not a new corporate mission statement. Take your normal mission statement (assuming you have one) and consider how that mission can be delivered through the sustainable lens. That is the objective.
Speaking with senior management teams I am often amazed by how little awareness of their business’s existing credit and alignment with sustainability. This can often be put down to the misconception that sustainability is associated to issues, problems or causes. A factor when your sustainability is too influenced by PR or philanthropic causes. In one notable case, the Board of an established utility service company providing cable and trenching services to other power and water utilities was amazed to discover that around 80% of their operational activities were associated with waste management and recycling of materials, and only 20% spent on digging holes in public roads. The realisation formed a dramatic rethink on what their purpose was, where their efficiencies lay, and the nature of the sustainability business alignment with their customers.
Understanding your existing services and activities, their materiality and linkage to existing ESG parameters is a critical step in your early organisational sustainability maturity, and the keystone from which you build, prioritise and extend sustainability actions.
Tip 3: Maturity in managing sustainability issues comes with experience. How do you gain that experience, often through lack of experience and taking time to analyse, debate and work through your sustainability priorities?
Few businesses can hope to achieve a more sustainable status overnight, although new starts and new disruptive competitors entering the marketplace can possess a significant advantage in this area. Few businesses start from scratch, and most have a history or legacy that often contains many positive sustainability actions already in place.
I have a confession, I enjoy reading Sustainability statements, not just their finely crafted words, and the range of issues they address, but also to get a glimpse behind the scenes. Many inadvertently give glimpses into the soul of the organisation, and its maturity with respect to sustainabi8lity matters. They can provide me with a strong impression of how strong, how committed, how active….or how lost that company was when they prepared that sustainability vision.
So what are the clues that sustainability statements leave for the experienced reader, and how can you assess whether a company and in particular its senior leadership team, are serious on the sustainability front? I have now developed quite an extensive list, but the standouts to avoid are:
A good sign of an organisation that is on the right sustainability track is whether they have understood these terms in the internal and public sustainability statements.
We will examine these five documents or statements more closely in the remaining sections. Each has a role4 in developing and refining the direction a company takes in the future and sets out a clear expectation of the activity that is needed by the leadership and the organisation’s employees.
Speak to us if you require any assistance in developing a comprehensive suite and business focussed Environmental Statement.