While nearly two-thirds of global business leaders expect to change their sustainability strategies in the next three to five years, the transition from planning to implementation must be a priority.
Bongwe Mbunge, business sustainability partner in Mazars, South Africa
This, according to Bongwe Mbung, business sustainability partner at Mazars in South Africa, is based on the results of the recent Mazars C-Suite Barometer – an annual survey of more than 1,000 business executives worldwide. Future prospects, perspectives and current affairs of companies.
Sustainability is a critical factor in budgetary constraints.
According to the barometer, funding remains the most important obstacle to ESG (environmental, social and governance) investment – this fact is determined by the level of financial directors in the sustainability budget. In Mbunge’s experience, herein lies the crux of the problem.
As she explains: “Traditional finance executives are not trained in pre-financial and non-financial data to have a full appreciation and actionable solution-focused lens to embed a sustainability strategy. As a result, budget initiatives are often divided with the strategy that the business needs. We believe closing this knowledge gap is essential to empowering more businesses to make this much-needed transition.
For Munge, a greater appreciation of the importance of sustainable transformation needs to be created at the boardroom level. With increasing pressure from employees, customers, investors, government and civil society, there is an ever-increasing threat to business continuity if boards do not effectively address ESG issues. As she explains, “Awareness must be closely followed by action, addressing ESG aspects of governance.”
Seven aspects of success in implementing a sustainability strategy
Based on recently published findings, A practical guide to sustainability for boards and management teamsAlso at Mazars, Mbunge stated that business leaders can demonstrate their commitment to sustainable goals by reducing their carbon footprint, implementing fair human rights policies, providing secure employment at a living wage, treating customers fairly, and building and implementing ethical and environmentally friendly supply chains. Clear and balanced tax policies.
The guide identifies seven critical success factors for sustainable boards and leadership teams. First, ‘leading from the top’ means that executive teams must be role models in promoting the management’s position and approach to sustainability. This requires a level of willingness to make decisions that may have a short-term negative impact on profitability, but in the long term will yield positive results in terms of ‘profits, planet and people’.
Secondly, every business must have a ‘motivating, sustainable and credible purpose’. For leadership teams, when Mbunge expands, this means things like, “Does our company’s mission statement fully encompass sustainability?” It means asking internal questions. and “Are the culture and strategy aligned with the objectives?”
Being ‘stakeholder oriented’ such as clear goals and priorities is another critical success factor. For example, when it comes to employee issues, companies should have clear policies on diversity and inclusion, including gender and ethnic diversity, and processes for tracking and reporting progress toward achieving these goals. .
Sustainable organizational culture
Then developing a strong organizational culture of sustainability is key. “This applies to all aspects of sustainability, including the business’s environmental impact policies, employee and customer treatment protocols and equity in management structures. Here, leaders should be asked to periodically review how a company’s grassroots actions reflect respect for human rights, the application of strong values, and how the company’s mission is screening every aspect of its operations. Mbunge.
She also states that sustainability needs to be deeply embedded throughout the business, applying to existing management structures to ensure that controls, information systems and processes are in place to measure performance.
Mbunge added, “Sustainability as a broad target needs to be refined into a number of sub-targets such as compliance levels, employee wages, employee incentives and internal communications – here, at the most limited level, the true culture of the company is revealed. He said.
As a journey sustainability
Sustainability should be seen as a journey, not a destination, says Mbunge. Taking a ‘strategic approach’ to embracing that journey and commitment is another critical success factor. This objective requires management teams to ask themselves: “Does the company’s leadership learn from the problems and challenges that arise in the business and the sector as a whole?”
The last success factor is ‘transparency in reporting’ – the importance can be linked to the results of the barometer which currently shows that 63% of businesses prepare regular sustainability reports, with plans to do so in the next 25%. 12 months. Here, the financial services sector is leading the way, followed by technology and telecommunications.
Mbunge concludes, “It is critical to provide executive teams with a practical framework for implementing sustainability strategies to avoid ongoing playbox exercises where the strategy only sees the light of day in quarterly meetings.
This allows executives to integrate a sustainability strategy with a practical and legal understanding of sustainability. This is a strategy that goes beyond corporate social responsibility initiatives, to enable the business to achieve its objective while making a responsible profit.
