The 4 Steps to Accelerating your Sustainability Strategy

There is no doubt that with the current Corona pandemic, businesses are taking a major hit.  

This is an extremely unstable and constantly evolving problem. Situations like the current one do not care for well thought out and developed business plans, and result in strategies being rendered quickly dated and difficult to follow through on.

This is especially true for sustainability strategies. Similarly to the Australian bushfires, which was a crisis for the environment and for sustainability, it can take time for businesses to readjust and work to achieve the targets that they had previously set for themselves. 

We do not know when this health crisis will end, or what shape businesses will be in when it does.

Therefore, being in a good place with your company's sustainability strategy is a good place to start. Knowing how to accelerate your sustainability strategy can help you to continue your good work afterwards. 

The Why and the How of a Sustainability Strategy

The starting point for accelerating your sustainability strategy in business must always come back to your company mission. This provides the starting point from which to analyse why the company exists, how it wants to work and what goals has it set for itself.  

As part of this process, every business must set about a process of prioritisation, whereby a company can set down the framework for analysing results and targets. 

To be relevant in the future, companies must be aware of and contribute positively to dealing with the sustainability challenges that are faced globally. As part of this, to ensure their competitive advantage, companies must acknowledge and demonstrate a commitment to working with their sustainability responsibilities. 

When a company wants to decide on its sustainability strategy it needs to decide on what is its main goal with it. If you want to comply, by working with Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG), companies can examine their sustainability performance across a number of factors. 

Environmental criteria examine how a company performs with relation to its responsibilities to nature. Social factors review how it deals with relationships with employees, customers and communities.

Finally, Governance refers to the set of rules and principles which deal with rights, responsibilities and expectations between different stakeholders in the management of corporations.

If your company wants to use measuring tools to report your sustainability efforts to investors then a further examination of ESG or Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)  is useful to prepare yourself for the future. 

The GRI is an international standards organization that helps businesses, governments and other organizations better understand and communicate their global impacts.

However, what the 17 SDGs do differently is provide more “direction and intentionality, in the standardization of language and focus given for areas of impact and potentially greater social return on investment (ROI) and financial return.

The SDGs provide great opportunities for businesses today and in the future. Businesses can work with the SDGs to not only to decide on where the challenges lie but where there are opportunities for global growth. 

If you want to improve your sustainability and are looking at mitigating risk for your investors, your company needs to look externally to examine what kind of product should you be producing, or what gap in the market should my company be working with. 

Enacting your sustainability strategy can be difficult or confusing with many businesses not knowing how or where to begin. Don’t worry, this article will take you through the FOUR key steps to accelerating the process of getting your sustainability strategy going.

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