5 Steps to Developing Your Sustainability Strategy
Developing a strong sustainability strategy doesn't have to be overwhelming — follow these five actionable steps to build a framework that strengthens your company's brand, reduces risk, and demonstrates meaningful corporate leadership.
Why Sustainability?
Sustainability criteria are a set of standards for a company’s operations that investors use to screen potential investments through a socially conscious lens.
EHS professionals are uniquely positioned to take the lead on sustainability initiatives. Developing and reporting on sustainability demonstrates your company’s strong corporate leadership and governance. This focus on measuring and improving sustainability metrics tends to positively impact a company’s brand, legal liability, and financial position.
5 Steps to Developing Your Sustainability Strategy
Step 1:
Determine Objectives & Strategies for Measurement
Here’s where you ask the important question, “How do environmental, social, and governance concepts relate to our corporate mission?” Not all aspects of sustainability will relate to your organization, but many will. Keep in mind, this is an activity that can’t be done in a vacuum. You’ll want to establish a cross departmental team of stakeholders to answer this question as well as tackle the remaining steps. This is the point in the process where you will establish your sustainability goals.
Step 2:
Determine Objectives & Strategies for Measurement
Objectives naturally flow from the goals you set in your previous step. From here your sustainability framework starts to take shape. This is where you’ll ask questions like, “What does success look like when we achieve our goals?” Clearly defined objectives inform key data points to monitor in order to demonstrate progress against these goals. From here you’ll determine your reporting frequency and start setting baselines.
Step 3:
Identify Risks & Opportunities
As you start developing objectives and establish measurement strategies, the risks and opportunities become more apparent across your business. Which areas are you lacking data? Which parts of the organization will be more challenging to get buy-in. On the flip side, where are your quick wins? Identifying your risks and opportunities helps prioritize your initiatives to ensure you’re focusing on the most impactful ones first.
Step 4:
Get Buy-In
Sustainability initiatives fall flat without buy-in from two key groups: your senior leadership and your employees.
Critical to the success or failure of most initiatives, senior leaders need to be both aligned and supportive of your sustainability initiative. They have the ability to reinforce that sustainability is an organizational priority as well as ensure proper funding and staffing.
With employees, sharing the company’s sustainability initiative is a great culture building opportunity. Much like building a culture of safety, building a culture that supports sustainability principles goes a long way toward employee satisfaction and retention.
Reach Your Sustainability Goals with Novara
Novara provides EHS and Workforce Compliance software and consulting services that help clients identify, remedy, and prevent problems across their enterprise.
The combination of Novara’s software, consulting services, and award-winning training helps organizations minimize risk so they can focus on what’s important—their core business.
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