A couple of months ago, we wrote an article entitled “What is ESG?”. As the Environmental, Social and Governance program gains more traction with many companies, their suppliers are now receiving questionnaires that can take quite an effort to complete. Some companies are getting multiple questionnaires, such as those sent out by Ecovadis. If you receive one of these questionnaires, be prepared to engage several parts of your organization in developing the response. These cover questions that need to be addressed by human resources, information technology, purchasing, and the environmental, health and safety (EHS) team.
You will also need someone to manage this effort and ensure the responses are consistent and do not contain confidential information, since some questions can touch on sensitive data. Many responses can be formulated using the same reference source such as an employee handbook. There may also be requests that your organization still needs to develop, such as what are your Scope 2 or 3 greenhouse gas emissions. It is not advisable to develop these just to answer the questionnaire as these can be very complicated answers and may also become an ESG key performance indicator.
If ESG is important to your organization or your customers, these surveys can serve as a baseline to know where you stand with respect to each ESG Management Indicator.
Once you have your ESG baseline, you can develop a more robust ESG strategy and become more attractive to your customers.
CMI has helped numerous clients complete these questionnaires and can assist in developing a plan to achieve a more robust ESG strategy.
Written by Kristian Witt