How to move an organisation’s sustainability reporting ambition from compliance to leadership

This story has significance for readers across Kenya and beyond.

Taking an organisation’s sustainability reporting from the bare minimum to a differentiated, market-leading position requires planning. There is a motivation for organisations that choose to focus on compliance when it comes to sustainability reporting.

For some organisations, the implementation journey is in its early phase, and therefore their reporting will also reflect the maturity of their overall sustainability journey.

Other organisations are still building capacity, making the necessary investments and determining their sustainability business case.

While these are valid reasons to take a compliance-focused approach to sustainability reporting, organisations cannot remain at a compliance-only level permanently.

Organisations that take a business-case lens to sustainability adoption, and intend to derive full utility from their reporting, will have to set their reporting ambition at the market-leadership level at which the organisation can attract investors.

One important step is to ensure sustainability reporting is deployed internally across an organisation to monitor, manage and measure risks and opportunities, and to preserve value.

Organisations should embed sustainability across their management structures. Sustainability needs to be applied internally in order to build credibility for the transition to leadership in reporting. Paying lip service to sustainability would prevent an organisation from achieving leadership in reporting.

Another important aspect to consider is integrating sustainability in the tools and systems used across every level of the organisation for decision-making.

Organisations should integrate sustainability in their dashboards, thereby enabling them to translate this capability into sustainability reporting easily.

Another consideration is the use of technology within the sustainability reporting. Tech-enabled reporting supports real-time decision-making, helping organisations build resilience and agility.

Attaining leadership in reporting requires alignment with financial reporting. Organisations need to understand the financial effects of sustainability from a strategic perspective.

They must aim to build trust with their stakeholders through relevant, transparent and consistent reporting to attain reporting leadership.

The writer is a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers. He is an author who writes and speaks widely on corporate reporting topics.

Reporting originally appeared via Business Daily. Read the full source for additional context.