Commencing your Sustainability Journey – Start with your Business Strategy
Commencing your Sustainability Journey – Start with your Business Strategy
So much is written now about the need to achieve net zero, ensure we are being nature positive, the risks associated with negative organizational environmental, governance and social impacts, etc.
Where does a business begin when it wants to embrace the most significant of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) for it’s business?
You can view the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals here: https://sdgs.un.org/goals
The process of overlaying the SDG’s on existing operations to identify impacts, confirming your material topics, undertaking due diligence to measure and mitigate, all while engaging internal and external stakeholders, is the way to integrate these key goals into the way you currently do business.
While for established businesses, this is a tested path to start a firm’s sustainability journey, for new businesses, or those developing or reviewing their business strategies, another option is to look at the result, or end product of the business strategy, at the time of development of the strategy, through a ‘sustainability’ lens.
The benefit of this is that every step of the journey can be reviewed from an impact perspective - from the initial concept, through development and implementation, sustainability will be top of mind and helping to drive responsible, planet friendly decision making.
The result of overlaying the SDG’s at the strategy development stage may be improved product R&D including the elimination of waste elements in the product or packaging; employees and workers may be engaged with the process and make further suggestions for existing and new product improvements; stakeholder collaboration will increase support for your sustainability transition, and investors will be supportive where they can reference these changes to the improvements in your overall business results.
We don’t always know when one of our products and/or services has changed someone’s life for the better, but consciously considering your business impact at the strategy development stage is a great start to improve your business’ chances of this being the outcome.
Sustainability may not be something you currently have to do to attract talent, clients and investors.
Sustainability is something you should want to do, to improve your business operation, financial results, employee retention, supplier engagement and investor support, among other benefits.
The choice is yours.
