3 Ways Going Digital Can Streamline Your ESG Efforts
ESG As Your Competitive Advantage
Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) has been a hot topic, top of mind for most, if not all employers. Key stakeholders are facing greater pressure from investors as well
as consumers, with 83% of consumers believing that organizations should be putting effort towards ESG strategies1.
Having ESG strategies in place can help businesses reduce risk, increase productivity, save costs, and improve their image with customers. It’s clear that showing your
organization is working towards improving ESG performance has not only become a priority, but your competitive advantage in the market.
But how can organizations evidence this in a cohesive manner? Today, many companies use internal systems and spreadsheets to support their ESG reporting needs. This can lead to
several challenges as Excel sheets can be prone to human error and can be time-consuming when inputting all data points. Implementing a digital solution can help simplify your efforts and enable
a more balanced approach with one comprehensive view into all three Environmental, Social, and Governance pillars.
3 Ways Digital Solutions Can Streamline ESG Efforts
1. Gain greater visibility into your ESG metrics
A cloud-based solution can give stakeholders across the organization greater visibility into ESG metrics, with all data in one place. According to our Environmental, Social, and
Governance Research conducted in October 2021, across 621 businesses in North America and the UK, two of the top three challenges regarding ESG reporting was collecting and
accessing data across the organization and its supply chains.
To have a comprehensive view of all ESG pillars, data must be collected across different systems, departments, teams, etc. Collecting data across multiple departments, teams,
systems, in addition to your supply chain can be a daunting task.
Data silos need to be broken down to gain greater transparency into all key elements across the organization, and in-house systems and Excel sheets often lack capabilities to do
this effectively. Having all data within a singular, cloud-based solution, on the other hand, can help to eliminate data silos and create a single source of truth for your organization with a
360-degree view into all three ESG pillars.
2. Manage your ESG program at scale
Digital solutions can also help you manage your ESG program at scale with a greater sense of efficiency. Organizations with multiple locations and stakeholders contributing to
your ESG program can have difficulty accessing different ESG criteria, with information dispersed across different systems and Excel sheets. With one centralized system, this no longer becomes a
challenge.
Easily grant access to your ESG metrics and program to all key stakeholders, with the help of a digital solution. This way, information can be easily shared and communication
among stakeholders and different business groups can be streamlined to help efficiently manage and modify different elements of your ESG program.
What’s more, is you can also create different organizational structures to segment data and information by region, country, site, etc. or aggregate it into a comprehensive
corporate view for executives to analyze.
3. Elevate your ESG program
With your ESG program, reporting, and metrics in one place, organizations can quickly pinpoint gaps, risks, or deficiencies which may have been hidden. With a clear-cut view, key
stakeholders can focus their resources on reducing risks revealed and shaping new policies and procedures to elevate and improve their ESG program.
For example, through proper ESG reporting, an organization can pinpoint where in their operations carbon emissions are too high and apply appropriate conversion factors for
regulatory compliance reporting. They could also assess People Development within the organization to gauge employee satisfaction.
According to a study done by Marsh & McLennan Advantage, capturing data for more than 7,500 companies globally, organizations with very satisfied employees score 14% higher
on ESG performance than average employers2. Teams that are invested and satisfied with their organization and job tasks are more dedicated and tend to stay with
the company for a longer period of time.
Our EcoOnline ESG research found that social risk including those related to health and safety, diversity, and community impacts are among the highest ESG risks in
the United States. With such insight, organizations can shape stronger strategies to improve ESG performance and reduce risk, to build a safer and more sustainable
organization.
How EcoOnline Can Help
The EcoOnline ESG solution enables organizations to build one true view of their ESG performance across the three pillars of responsible business. This helps to set a challenging
balance that changes behaviors for commercial benefit. The suite of 11 modules aggregates data into one reporting and analytics platform to create greater transparency, improve internal
benchmarking and leverage actionable insights to cascade policies and procedures throughout operations.
To find out more about how we can help support your organization’s ESG needs, fill out the form below or speak to one of our safety experts today.
References:
1 PwC, Beyond compliance:
Consumers and employees want business to do more on ESG, Jun. 2021
2 Marsh & McLennan Advantage, ESG as a Workforce Strategy – Part 1: Overview and Results,
2020