Sustainable development is at the centre of good governance in the twenty-first century. As businesses evolve, they should be prepared to deal with changing demands on their organisational structure.
What exactly does sustainable development mean? In short, it means making sure you are responsible for the evolution of your company. As you grow, the needs of your organisation will change. This should not come at the expense of your environmental, social or governance standards.
It’s one thing to brainstorm ideas about how you want your organisation to look in ten years, but it’s another to follow those ideas through. With 30 years of experience in promoting good governance, we’ve put together some advice for taking control over your journey.
Top Tips To Improve Your Sustainable Development:
- Don’t Be Afraid To Lead The Way
In the design stage, it’s important to look at what has worked in the past and learn from your successful history. However, this doesn’t mean you have to mechanically follow the same steps as everyone else. Sustainable development is the perfect time to take the initiative.
Your climate leadership will benefit from a unique approach, designed around your individual organisation. This means you can’t just follow the crowd! Lead the way in developing new policies that work with the size and resources your organisation has to offer.
- Ensure The Right People Are In Charge
If your organisation is leading the way, you need the right people in charge. Although sustainable development is something that everyone in the company should be involved in, it is always useful to have particular individuals who can be held accountable.
When delegating the responsibility for sustainable development plans, assess their current skills and potential. Don’t throw someone in at the deep end and hope for the best! It’s important to be realistic with what they can realistically achieve with the resources of your organisation.
You may wish to appoint a Chief Sustainability Officer to ensure there is an individual in charge. However, even if this wouldn’t work within your organisation, you should pay attention to who holds responsibility.
- Focus On Action
Plans are useless without concrete changes to your day-to-day policy. At every stage of the meeting process, you should emphasise the actions that every individual within the organisation should be taking.
This starts when you are building the agenda for a meeting. Underline any action items and make sure they form the backbone of your structure. You should then follow this through during the meeting itself and after the meeting when you are composing the meeting minutes.
- Track Your Progress
One of the key tenets of good management is monitoring your results. Sustainable development is a long-term project which means this is more important than ever. You need to analyse the actions you have taken and ensure you are on the right track.
Using ESG reporting software, you can monitor data gathering, performance tracking, and reporting. Of course, you shouldn’t be put off if you are not meeting early targets. But you can use them to focus on specific areas where you need to make improvements.
- Invest In Communication
Communication is at the heart of any successful project, so why would it be any different for sustainable development? Everyone in your company should be on the same page when it comes to your aims and processes. This way, you can create an environment where the whole team is working together to achieve their best results.
How Can Convene Help Your Sustainable Development?
Convene is an award-winning Board Portal, designed to digitise and streamline your meeting processes from start-to-finish. Now available fully integrated Microsoft Teams, our comprehensive software has numerous features to ensure fluent communication before, during and after meetings. Not to mention, all your meetings will be paperless when you use Convene with our secure document library!
Alongside this, we've been working on our own ESG reporting tool, so you can monitor your journey. A comprehensive ESG report is essential to sustainable governance and we can help simplify the process. All you need to do is input your relevant data and Convene ESG will create a Word document with all information correctly formatted.
We are currently collaborating with a number of existing Convene housing customers as part of our early adopters programme. Through their valuable feedback, we will continue to develop and refine our platform, delivering a robust end-to-end ESG experience. The software has been recently updated to reflect the changes to the SRS.
To find out more about how Convene’s Board Portal or ESG reporting software can support your sustainable development, contact us today to book a free trial.
