ESG Program: Your Digital Hub to Operationalize ESG Reporting

ESG professionals armed with data are finding opportunities to influence top-line growth and corporate strategy, but how can teams efficiently collect and access that data when information is coming from so many sources? 

According to a Workiva survey, roughly 8 in 10 decision makers believe technology is key for compiling data and validating it for accuracy. Scaling ESG efforts can involve a tremendous amount of coordination to collect the right data across teams, geographies, and even suppliers, but here’s what can help. 

Plan the work, and work the plan

A successful ESG program needs to be integrated into day-to-day business functions. But make sure to define your goals and purpose. I’ve seen some technology implementation projects where teams over-index on the execution part of “implementation,” which can reveal the shortcomings of a lack of planning soon after.

For example, I witnessed one integration of a desktop analytics tool for more than 1,000 users. The team took shortcuts in user training, which left users under-skilled with the tools they were promised and caused the security team to miss a simple laptop upgrade that needed software security— which later required an entire hardware upgrade.

So first, define your goals and purpose, determine how you’ll measure progress, and look for an ESG platform that you can use to centralize your data collection, tracking, and reporting on all things ESG. 

For example, the Workiva ESG reporting solution includes our ESG Program feature to serve as your digital hub for operationalizing ESG efforts across your organization. 

As you can see in the video above, ESG Program is what helps bring your ESG plans to life. Here you can align your ESG data and teams around your core strategy, simplify ESG data management, and assign tasks to make the strategy actionable from end to end, as you assess which ESG topics are material for your organization, track progress toward goals, and share them. 

Operationalizing ESG efforts can be like conducting an orchestra

Once you’ve determined what kinds of data you need to track, who is the primary owner of the data, and what is the source of that data, you can leverage automation to create repeatable, audit-ready processes for many teams across your company to extract and share the data.

With the Workiva platform, you can customize views within the ESG Program in our ESG solution to show the topics that are most important or material to your organization. From there:

• Fully manage your ESG operations and strategy in one place
• Simplify and assign ESG data collection tasks across teams
• Gain visibility into performance and status
• Map alignment to embedded ESG frameworks
• Designate a preparer and reviewer and easily visualize progress via the dashboard
• Collaborate in real time and maintain a full audit trail 

Technology is the critical backbone for orchestrating ESG efforts across your organization, so you can all work together on building your ESG initiatives. With Workiva’s ESG Program, you can accomplish more in less time and also reduce costly audit headaches downstream. Set your strategy into action with the ESG Program, exclusively in the Workiva ESG reporting software solution.

Watch the video to learn more, or request a customized demo.