An essential feature of a good sustainability report is its ability to draw connections across different areas of an organisation. At a minimum, the expectation is for sustainability reports to demonstrate a strong relationship between the various materiality topics, the risks, opportunities, and impact across the entire business.
Secondly, it ensures that the organisation shows connections between the disclosures in the different segments of the report. This connection is often evidenced by a common thread that binds the information provided, giving a complete picture of how sustainability impacts the organisation.
Lastly, it ensures consistency between the information in the financial statements and that provided in the sustainability report.
The goal of reporting on how an organisation’s strategic priorities are enabled through the sustainability material topics selected, the determination of performance measures on those material topics, the related risks, opportunities and impact (financial and non-financial) requires organisations to adopt a collaborative approach rather than a silo thinking.
For an organisation to translate what sustainability means financially, there must be a common understanding of sustainability and finance by forming multi-disciplinary teams across the organisation.
These diverse teams exchange ideas through collaboration to arrive at what’s best for the organisation, building trust and ensuring that teams support each other towards achieving the ultimate goal of building a sustainable business.
Cascading the why, what and how of sustainability for an organisation through engagement with internal stakeholders fosters a culture of ownership among staff members and leads to efficient and effective outcomes.
The inability of staff members to draw connections between how their day-to-day tasks impact the sustainability conversation is a major drawback when implementing sustainability across the organisation. This inability to draw connections has often led to resistance and silo thinking within the organisation, a culture that further harms the organisation in the medium to long term.
Compared to traditional reporting, sustainability reporting has the potential to enable collaboration across organisations.
For instance, for organisations to embed sustainability reporting, they have to design systems, processes and policies across different functional teams that own the data used for reporting and, therefore, should understand why that information is critical for measuring performance against their sustainability targets.
Compared to traditional reporting, sustainability reporting has the potential to enable collaboration across organisations.
Akinyemi Awodumila is a Partner at Deloitte East Africa. He is an author who writes and speaks widely on corporate reporting topics
