ESG As Your Competitive Advantage

83% of consumers believe 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 an organization's 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 Alcumus 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 Alcumus Can Help

The Alcumus 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.

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