Focus and strategy

Sustainability strategies are about minimizing risks, but they’re also about seizing new opportunities. By researching best practices and analyzing the sustainability efforts of your peers, competitors and customers, you can identify excellent opportunities for differentiation and growth. We’ll help you examine public information, specialized databases and global trends—and transform the results into pragmatic recommendations for your company. By learning from others, there is no need to reinvent the wheel.

A structured materiality assessment helps you to understand which economic, environmental and social issues are most relevant for your company’s stakeholders, your impacts, and the issues that drive long-term value creation. It forms the foundation for your sustainable business strategy, reveals which KPIs to track and facilitates alignment with reporting standards. We’ll identify potentially relevant topics, assist you in prioritizing them from different perspectives, and present your company’s material issues in a way that’s easy to understand.

Your stakeholders are a valuable source of information. Engaging with them through surveys, interviews, roundtables or forums gives you an outside perspective on new opportunities and emerging risks. Strong cross-functional relationships with your stakeholders is vital for sustainable value creation and innovation. A hands-on approach also positions you as a credible, proactive partner. We’ll identify stakeholders who can provide relevant feedback about your company, facilitate productive interaction and document the findings.

When developing (or updating) your strategy, it’s important to understand how sustainability issues might affect your ability to create value over the long term. We recommend integrating sustainability into your core strategy, though we can also help you design a stand-alone sustainability approach. We’ll roll out your strategy using tools such as Sustainability Strategy Maps and devise actionable plans for ongoing implementation and related communication.

Goals represent your commitment to the future. They guide your employees and keep your stakeholders on track. Base your sustainability goals on your company’s most relevant issues and use well-designed metrics, so you can monitor their performance over time. We can help you develop meaningful, actionable goals that respond to the needs of your stakeholders and have the potential to drive innovation and growth.

Policies, guidelines and codes establish and clarify what is expected from suppliers, employees and other stakeholders. They are used to manage sustainability topics, including human rights and environmental performance. We will use our knowledge of current best practices either to identify gaps in your existing policies or help you develop new ones. Effective policies will reflect your corporate culture, resonate with their audience and acknowledge the expectations of all stakeholder groups.

Management approaches outline how to deal with material issues. They are used to assign responsibilities, monitor performance and initiate corrective measures. When assessing your management procedures, it’s important to ask: Why are certain issues important to my business? How are these issues being managed within the organization? We can help you find the right answers and work out whether your current approaches are fit for purpose.

Understanding your value creation model is vital for sustainable performance. You should be able to articulate the factors that drive your long-term value creation, as well as potential risks. We’ll strengthen your ability to generate value by exploring the relationships between your resource inputs, your core business model and its impact. These insights will help you to establish connections between financial and non-financial factors, so you can allocate capital more effectively and identify new opportunities for innovation.

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) risk management is essential for ensuring solid business performance. ESG risks such as the impacts of climate change (and its mitigation), corruption or human rights violations might affect your ability to create value in the short, medium or long term. We’ll work with you to perform a risk & opportunity assessment across a range of ESG factors, so that you can prioritize the risks facing your company and make more informed decisions.