Achieving Sustainability: Insight into your Goals and KPI might be the answer
At Sustaira, we believe sustainability is mindfully meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. We also believe that doing this and truly seeking sustainability goes beyond reporting. Sustainability is far more engaging than just an annual report. It lives in goal setting, in data aggregation and raising awareness, in taking action, in seeing results and rewards of those actions, and of course the ever important, reporting. In our experience, one of the most important steps in a sustainability journey for any company is not just setting goals and KPI, but then having the ability to track those items, and measure them. This initial step allows for more awareness, action, rewards, and makes reporting easier.
What are KPI and Goals?
When talking about KPI and Goals around Sustainability, that can mean many different things. Some Goals or KPI, while easy to implement in a small company, become a massive task for larger organizations and require countless sub goals and sub-KPI.
A great example of how other people are doing this, is the #1 fortune 100 company, Walmart. In their ESG and Sustainability plans, they note that like many other organizations, they used the UN’s SDGs and other popular frameworks to decide their roadmap. Walmart’s sustainability and ESG plan has four overarching focuses
Opportunity: specific to employees getting better wages, education, and promotions.
Sustainability: A focus around zero emissions by 2040, diverting waste, and reduction efforts.
Community: efforts related to donating food, COVID testing, and hiring opportunities.
Ethics & Integrity: looking at engagement in public policy, governance, human rights and general ethics and compliance.
As you can imagine, addressing each one of these consists of many steps and many different KPI such as tracking wages, gender, scope 1 and 2 emissions tracking, scope 3 tracking specifically around waste, shifting to renewable energy sources, setting up COVID testing sites, donating food, shifting diversity on their ethics board, the list goes on. We notice that sustainability is not just reporting or just environmental, it's the entire story. For an organization as large as Walmart you can only imagine the amount of data and tracking related to each one of these goals they've set.
Another example is Jacobs Engineering. Jacobs launched their PlanBeyond in 2019 to outline their sustainable business strategy. This plan outlines 6 main goals from the UN’s SDGs that they are focusing on. Many companies do very similarly to Jacobs, including Sustaira and Walmart, and choose their top SDGs to focus their sustainability and ESG plan around. At Jacobs, their main focuses include:
Good health and well-being: Advance the health, wellbeing and safety of society
Clean Water and Sanitation: Deliver solutions for the global water and sanitation crisis
Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure: Foster a culture of technology and innovation important to the advancement of society
Reduced Inequalities: Create a fair and inclusive future for all
Sustainable Cities and Communities: develop efficient and resilient solutions that deliver net environmental and societal gain
Climate Action: Accelerate solutions that address the climate emergency
Like Walmart, Jacobs has countless KPI and Goals related to each one of these overarching items. Some of those KPI include certain partnerships, protection of resources, enablement, innovation, tracking the typical emissions, DEI, and other common statistics, and even entire projects or roadmaps around each one of the SDGs they are focused on.
The trend is becoming more clear. As we look at organizations in every industry, everyone has slightly different main goals or KPI they are focused on for this year. It always comes back to each organization having or needing a clear roadmap focusing on specific KPI and data to back up their plans and show their progress. For every goal or seemingly simple action around sustainability and ESG, there are countless sub-goals and thresholds to hit in order to reach them. This gets exponentially more in depth, the bigger the company is and the more impact they have.
The Common Challenges.
Currently, there is not a universal reporting standard or a globally accepted set of goals and KPI related to sustainability. A few common standards or frameworks that organizations have adopted include the GRI Standards, the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, CDP, Dow Jones Sustainability Index, GRESB, and SASB. While there are countless others, these are some of the most popular. However, each of these frameworks or reporting agencies, while they may have the same goal of sustainability, how organizations might report on that, or which KPI are required, varies immensely. CDP focuses on greenhouse gas emissions, while GRI has an equal weight on corporate social responsibility, environmental, social and governance factors, while SASB looks at the financial impacts of ESG. What we’ve found is that each of these has slightly different requirements, or is set up for a different audience. Again, we come back to the fact that there isn't just one framework or set of requirements. Which is part of why creating a solution that can fit any framework, and has the flexibility to change as requirements do, has become a necessity.
Over the last few months, our team has had over 50 calls with organizations that vary from smaller renewable energy providers, to the massive household names that we see everyday. What does this small energy provider have in common with those huge names? We’ve found that they all face the same challenges. Even the companies that have started their sustainability journey, maybe they’ve explored energy efficiency projects, or have started aggregating a handful of KPI such as purchased electricity, water usage, direct emissions, or they’re even diving into scope 3 and trying to investigate their supply chain and product lifecycle… Regardless of how seemingly mature the organization is, they are still coming back to the same core challenges:
“Our sustainability roadmap is incomplete. Our actions or projects around sustainability are a little haphazard or random. Our systems of tracking and measuring our goals and KPI either simply don't exist or are spread around excel spreadsheets, emails, and core systems like an Enablon, HR systems, or various other CRMs/PLMs, and more. We have a roadmap and an idea of how we want to do things, but need a way to track and measure all of this.” Or they might say, “we have this plan at a corporate level or team level, but want to share what we are doing internally and externally and don't have a great way to do so.” The list goes on.
At Sustaira, we knew we had to address this.
Think about any goal you’ve ever set for yourself. Perhaps it's a weight loss goal, or to read more books, or get that certification for your job. Each of these goals has measurable key performance indicators and steps that must happen that show you’ve made progress toward your goal. To achieve progress or to stay motivated, being able to see where you’re at can allow you to adjust your course if things aren't going well, or celebrate your victories as you reach milestones. The same exact principle is applied to sustainability and ESG. In order to reach carbon neutral by 2030, or to dive into your supply chain, or diversify your organization, you need an action plan and real-time insights into where you are now, and where you're going. What if we told you that Sustaira has built a customizable, flexible solution that can do just that?
Sustaira’s Projects and KPI Tracker Application:
Sustaira’s Project’s and KPI Tracker application was made to solve the common challenges we hear when it comes to building a sustainability roadmap and tracking progress. Ultimately, this application allows users to set goals and KPI, track their progress, and build accountability and awareness. Upon first entering the application users will see this main dashboard that is Kanban style to show the progress of any projects or goals. These projects and goals are currently based on the UN’s 17 SDGs, users can create projects around this same framework, or they have the option to create projects to align to those goals or KPI.
When clicking on any project a user will be able to add any KPI and track data points. This can show the progress being made, the future goal, and can even forecast when a goal might be reached based on your previous data points. This includes the ability to set action items to help manage any internal goals that don't reflect in the KPI data, but ultimately enable an organization to reach the KPI or Goals set.
If a user needs help getting started or isn’t sure where to go next, simply use the suggested projects throughout the app or through the quick start survey. Select the goals that best fit and see suggestions based on those selections.
This application can stand on its own, or has the option to be integrated directly with an organization’s core systems via API or web service to eliminate excel based or manual processes. This allows organizations to have a live view into each goal or KPI they’ve set and offers the ability to share that progress with other stakeholders both internally and externally.
Interested in learning more about this application or how it might fit your organization? Please drop us a line, and Maggie Burnham will reach out to you directly to answer any questions or set up a more personalized conversation.
Sustainability starts with Sustaira, will you join the journey?
