How to be sustainable
Grow your business with sustainable resources in mind.
Sustainable development, corporate social responsibility and footprint reduction are all live topics for discussion. But what do they really mean for your business? Depending on the industry the answer differs — and yet whether it is chemical manufacturing, agribusiness, grape growing, winemaking or coffee farming, there is a common thread: respecting and addressing the social, environmental and economic needs of the communities you operate in, while ensuring benefits for employees, customers and investors.
It starts with one thing. Commitment.
At SBI we are passionate about improving the world, and we believe private enterprise can and should be a major and effective player in doing it. So what makes a business more sustainable? Five commitments, and the discipline to hold them.
- What the company buys
- Whom it buys from
- What it manufactures
- Who makes the products
- Social and environmental practices throughout the chain
Materiality
Material is what a reasonable person would act on.
Materiality is a concept from auditing and accounting: information is material if its omission or misstatement in a financial statement could influence the economic decision of an investor, a regulator or a supplier. It depends on the size of the item, judged in the circumstances, and on whether a reasonable person relying on that information would have been influenced by leaving it out. Materiality is therefore a threshold — the cut-off that guides a company on what to disclose.
The main driver for discussing materiality in a sustainability context is the growing weight of sustainability reports. Studies indicate that publicly reporting social and environmental performance keeps a business on its toes: building the report is the single most important driver of change in how these issues are managed, because it increases organisational knowledge, forces reflection, and transforms policy and practice. Under an annual deadline, a manager has to face last year's commitments and disclose whether things improved.
Transparency is not confined to an annual report, though. A materiality assessment is equally critical in setting a company's sustainability strategic direction — which is why it is where an SBI engagement starts, not where it reports.
Reporting is not an end in itself. It is only useful if it discloses publicly and formally how your sustainability strategy includes corporate action, and facilitates change.
The review committee
Determining materiality calls for a sustainability report review committee, and the committee needs the right expertise around the table: labour, human rights, environmental, social, economic and diversity issues. Assembled properly it is the difference between a report that reflects the business and a report that reflects the marketing department.
What the assessment reads
A materiality assessment identifies the issues that reflect your company's significant economic, environmental and social impacts, or that substantively influence the assessments and decisions of stakeholders. It draws on a variety of resources, internal and external:
- Papers on company objectives, strategies, policies, programmes and risk factors
- Employee surveys, and input gathered through other feedback mechanisms
- Customer-contact feedback
- Shareholder resolutions and anecdotal feedback
- Input gathered through stakeholder dialogues
- Informal input from suppliers
- Media coverage and blog discussion of company issues
- Stakeholder feedback on the company's past sustainability reports
- The Global Reporting Initiative's guidelines
Third-party proof
The shaping of corporate social responsibility.
Johnson Institute Exemplary Leadership Award
University of Pittsburgh. Sandra Taylor's career became the subject of a case study used to teach sustainability leadership at graduate level — University of Pittsburgh Case Study Series, Fall 2017.
The widely used term Corporate Social Responsibility refers to an enlightened philosophy about a corporation's responsibilities to the public.
In general, CSR embraces the notion that corporations need to be proactive, not just reactive, in improving their impact on society.
For maximum impact, a vibrant CSR programme must be embraced by the top leaders in the organisation and fully integrated into the firm's mission, operating values and business strategy. The philosophy invites a corporation to find ways of meeting its own business goals while doing what is right for the communities, nations and world it works in.
The future is now
Wherever you are on the journey.
SBI helps companies reduce their environmental footprint and develop valuable relationships with communities and stakeholders. Whether you are a recent adopter of sustainability priorities or you intend to lead your sector on them, we provide guidance and work closely with you to:
Strategy
Develop a viable corporate responsibility and sustainability strategy — built on the material issues, with owners, budgets and oversight at board level.
Engagement
Engage with community leaders, activists and employees, for the good of all of them and of the business that depends on them.
Investment
Identify opportunities for corporate giving, strategic philanthropy and social investment that do more than buy a photograph.
Communication
Design communication tools, sustainability reports included, aligned with the business goals they are reporting against.
An essential first step.
Sustainability strategic planning starts by identifying the material issues senior management must weigh in order to minimise environmental risk and maximise opportunity. A first-rate strategy provides a structure for managing every sustainability challenge and impact, and puts responsible practice at the core of business planning — supply chain accountability, environmental impact assessment, governance, stakeholder engagement, social and community commitments, and transparency.
Start with an assessment