What are the benefits of providing ESG information and how much of it is actually useful?
“There are so many good benefits to doing this work,” said Jennifer Cantero, director of marketing and sustainability at Sensiba San Filippo in Pleasanton, California. “Understanding and getting a good benchmark of your nonfinancial metrics definitely is a good one. Doing this also helps root out waste and inefficiency in your company. It attracts talent and keeps your current talent engaged. Companies that have these frameworks and are looking at these metrics have a higher percentage of employee engagement and employee satisfaction within their companies. That breeds better productivity for the company overall.”
“One of the misconceptions out there is that sustainability is purely environmental, and it’s a cost,” said Scott Anderson, an audit partner at SSF. “If you really look at it and you get past the surface of the topic, you’ll quickly realize that this is actually about cost-cutting, operational efficiency and risk management. You get into SASB KPIs for a specific industry. It’s all about performing better, and in most cases being more profitable.”
“One thing that I think gets lost when I talk to people about ESG is everybody spends 90 percent of their time on E, which is where the world is right now with carbon and greenhouse gases,” said Brent Leslie, director of audit and attest services at Berkowitz Pollack Brant. “That’s part of it, but I think a lot of the time the S and the G get overlooked, and that’s just as important from the overall mission. There’s absolutely the social side of it. Hiring policies, and the governance on that side of it, and what are your policies as far as your board, and what are your diversity policies? Those are just as important as the E. Right now a lot of people just view this as just a carbon type of thing, but hopefully we’re educating people and that’s evolving a little bit.”
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