Where Do You Start With a Sustainability Strategy?
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the thought of a sustainability strategy, especially when you look at competitors that have 100-page sustainability reports, or others who are engaged in carbon markets and piloting biodiversity disclosures.
Don’t panic. I want to tell you two things that will hopefully put you at ease. First, those companies didn’t do all of that at once — it takes years of slow and steady development to get to that stage. Second, you don’t have to do all of that. All you have to do is start with small, achievable goals that get the ball rolling.
Besides, nobody actually reads a 100-page sustainability report anyway.
So, where do you start? Let’s jump into that. It’s not as hard as you think.
What is a sustainability strategy?
Before we get into talking about how to build one, let’s just give a quick overview of what a sustainability strategy actually is.
A sustainability strategy is essentially your company’s blueprint for reaching the sustainability goals and objectives that your company has defined. It’s highly subjective and is based on the priorities of your company and its stakeholders.
There are some regulations that dictate certain metrics that need to be tracked or specific methods that need to be undertaken when developing a sustainability strategy, however, if your company doesn’t have hundreds of employees and tens of millions of dollars in revenue, you don’t need to worry about that.
If you do hit that threshold where sustainability reporting regulations are going to affect you (mostly for companies with business in the EU), there are some rules you need to follow, but still, it isn’t as complicated as it looks at first glance.
A sustainability strategy could be anything from decarbonizing your entire supply chain to something much simpler like reducing waste or implementing more energy efficient lighting. If you aren’t subject to reporting requirements, the choice is up to you.
In any sustainability strategy, you only need to have three things, and these should drive your strategy:
- Goals
- Metrics to measure progress
- A plan for getting there
Where do you start with a sustainability strategy?
The first thing to do when developing a sustainability strategy is identify your organization’s priorities. There are a thousand things you could do to make your business more sustainable, but what’s important to your business and what makes sense?
Part of this identification process will have to be done internally, but you can’t forget about the priorities of your stakeholders. What do your customers want to see you do? What do your investors want you to do? What do your employees and the community in which you operate want to see you do?
You can build a strategy internally, but the effectiveness of it and the impact that it will have will be so much greater if your strategy includes the things that your stakeholders also care about.
Let your stakeholders guide your strategy. Talk to them, find out what their priorities are, and then use those discussions to identify the priority area(s) where your business will focus its sustainability strategy.
As part of this priority identification, you will also want to look at your competitors and find out what some of the industry-specific challenges are as it pertains to sustainability.
A materiality assessment could help identify which issues regarding sustainability are most relevant to your business.
Don’t try to do it all
The idea behind all of this is to narrow your focus. Especially at the start of your sustainability journey, don’t try to do everything all at once. Find the most important issues to you, your industry, and your stakeholders, and go after those. You can pick just one if you like but don’t go for more than three priority areas.
Once you have those priority areas, then you can go about setting goals and picking metrics to measure your progress.
Keep it small, figure out what you’re doing, and then revise and build from there as the years progress and you get more experience under your belt.
Just like anything, take it one step at a time. Nobody, not even regulators, are looking for perfection. What everyone wants to see is that you understand the issues and are making meaningful efforts to do something about it.
If you want guidance throughout this process, we can provide you with surveys to bring to your stakeholders, competitor benchmarking analysis, market research, goal-setting guidance and more.
The best thing to do is start now while regulations are more flexible, because the reality is that more regulations are coming, and once they do they will complicate the entire proces
Contact Sustainable Sense today to put your sustainability strategy in motion.
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