A new Deloitte survey report – Sustainability in Industry Today: A Cross Industry View – has a number of interesting findings and starts off well, with a focus on Closing the gap between aspiration and action:
…our survey also suggests that many companies have a clear gap between their leaders’ aspirations with regard to sustainability and the way that sustainability is enabled within their organizations.
The 48 large company respondents did not reveal anything significantly different from much of the ‘as-is’ corporate thinking around sustainability but the report makes some useful suggestions for recognising the need to:
- Align sustainability effort with corporate strategy
- Integrate sustainability into operations and processes
- Structure non-traditional collaborations and extend existing collaborations
- Set up an appropriate sustainability governance structure
All in all this sounds like the blueprint for a rather large and frankly unsustainable consulting gig. But businesses have to start somewhere and for me it all starts with this:
Companies should identify key metrics for understanding current and desired sustainability outcomes
Preferably by just cherry-picking them from the existing GRI/DEFRA (UK)/DVFA (EU) sets. Get started by beginning at the end, then collect the data to evidence your progress, connect the dots (financial and non-financial) and communicate the results as transparently and widely as possible.
Everyone knows that more sustainability-related regulation is inevitable. But why head for a repeat of the Sarbanes-Oxley debacle? Do shareholders really want businesses to once again throw large sums of money at getting their processes in place, people trained up and partners in sync for ‘new’ sustainability legislation when it is not too hard to anticipate the shape and form it will take?
Get your feet wet now. You don’t need a full-blown EMS (or environmental ERP as I call it) just something to set objectives, collect the data and report it (plan, do, check etc.) so you can make progress at your own sustainable pace.
