Steps To Creating A Good Sustainability Report
Creating a reliable sustainability report is essential for businesses that want to be taken seriously.
This is especially true in this era in which a lot of emphasis is placed on climate change and environmental issues. Indeed, there are modern practices and trends that can improve the efficiency of creating sustainability reports.
Generally, a sustainability report is a comprehensive report that provides information about the environmental, social, and economic performance of an organization.
Following are the important steps of reliable and efficient sustainability reporting:
1. Set Goals
Before you start the process of creating a sustainability report, you should have a clear idea about the goals that you want to accomplish through it. For this purpose, you should get familiar with the modern trends of creating sustainability reports in your specific industry.
Moreover, you should stick to a common topic in your sustainability reports like discussing people, planet, and profit (three P’s). Such factors include discussing the impact of the company’s working procedures on people, the environment, and overall, how the company is making money.
2. Review Your Performance
It is important to create a fair and transparent sustainability report. Hence, you should review your performance honestly and write down the sustainability goals you might not have met due to some reasons.
You should include a separate section for future work so that anyone who reads the sustainability report will have trust in it and the overall performance.
3. Data Collection
Data collection is a critical part of creating a reliable sustainability report. However, some data may not be available with the presence of certain constraints when it comes to data collection.
You should expect a variety of challenges in data collection, so it is better to be prepared for them in advance and narrow down the most reliable indicators in a sustainability report. This can ensure you do not spend too much time and energy on it.
Furthermore, a common mistake when preparing sustainability reports is that the critical analysis of data is not included. You should focus on analyzing the data critically so that reliable results can be determined from the data.
4. Responsibilities
An important step of creating a good sustainability report is that you should develop a strong team to handle various parts and sections of the report. Large-scale organizations typically have more resources dedicated to creating reports and performing sustainability reporting.
On the other hand, small and medium-sized companies have the option of contacting an accounting firm in Malaysia to get help from the professionals and ensure a reliable sustainability report is created.
5. Easy Communication
The terms and terminologies used in a sustainability report should be defined properly so that everyone can clearly understand the report. Moreover, the report should be properly organized and formatted to make it an easy read.
General Outline of a Good Sustainability Report
- The report must have an effective introduction of the business and the various procedures associated with the sustainability report. The purpose of the introduction is to introduce your business to all kinds of readers, including the customers. It should also include information about the market environment and the importance of sustainability in the report.
- Sustainability practices should be thoroughly discussed in the sustainability report to establish the applicable sustainability rules in the business.
- One of the best ways of making your sustainability report more effective is by discussing the sustainability strategy, in short, medium, and long terms. These goals should reflect the overall business goals and other risks should also be highlighted. Large organizations can also discuss the sustainability goals for different departments.
- It is critical to describe and explain the main risks and opportunities included in the sustainability agenda of an organization.
Takeaways
The bottom line is that sustainability reporting is a highly important part of all types of businesses in this era. We hope that by following the strategies discussed in this post, you can perform sustainability reporting in an efficient manner.
There’s no one formula to create the perfect sustainability report. However, if you follow the standards and good practices of writing a formal report, you will be in a good position to have a reliable sustainability report.
This process can be made much easier by engaging the service of a professional accounting firm in Malaysia and getting professional services for sustainability reporting.
