Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) is top of mind for organisations and their boards, employees, customers, and investors. It’s a framework designed to be embedded into an organisation's strategy that considers the needs and ways in which to generate value for all organisational stakeholders in the following areas:
- Environmental - Concerns both the environmental sustainability and threat of climate impact and often represents externalities, such as influences on e.g., greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity, waste management, and water management.
- Social – is represented by both internal and external factors. Internally, by mitigating social biases and broadening talent pools, employers are far more likely to find the optimal person for the job and foster a more inclusive work environment. Externally, emphasis is placed on human rights, impact on local communities, health and welfare of employees and a more thorough examination of a company's supply chain. Consumer protection, animal welfare, and conservation are also in the remit of social responsibility.
- Governance – is the structures and processes that direct and control organisations. It makes organisations more accountable and transparent to investors and gives them the tools to respond to stakeholder concerns. It is focussing on e.g., management structure, employee relations, employee as well as executive compensations.
Lars Kristian Larsen
Senior Manager, NextGen Operations
KPMG in Denmark
Why should you operationalise your ESG strategy?
However, the challenge today is how to integrate ESG data and processes into the day-to-day operations of an organisation, to ensure that the business is moving positively towards achieving its ESG objectives.
While different aspects of ESG have been tackled in an ad hoc fashion, companies are increasingly being asked for holistic management and reporting of ESG impacts – from carbon emissions to talent attraction and retention, to data security and privacy. Keeping up with these demands is usually a manual, time-consuming and error-prone exercise comprising spreadsheets, emails, and data pulls from multiple siloed software tools that address only discrete ESG topics.
How can KPMG help?
KPMG NextGen Operations specialises in the implementation of operational ESG tools, with special expertise on the ServiceNow platform. We are ServiceNow’s lead launch and design partner for the new integrated ESG solution and have been named ServiceNow Global Transformation Partner of the Year for the last two years.
Across the ESG spectrum, ServiceNow’s ESG Management (ESGM) application transforms the way you manage, visualise, and report on issues. By streamlining data collection, organisation, and storage of information in one easy-to-use system, the power of ServiceNow can be harnessed to automate dashboards and reports for internal audiences, as well as external disclosures aligned with ESG standards and frameworks.
Our approach is to set up your ESG Program and help define the ESG topics that are most material for your business. With ServiceNow ESGM, you can define metrics and KPIs for all your goals and targets, as well as customise how they will be collected – manual through data entry or automatic through integrations with other ServiceNow and third-party software. ESGM then allows you to document these topics and visualise them in an interactive materiality matrix for better resource prioritisation, decision-making, and storytelling. As you progress further on an ESG transformational journey to bridge ESG gaps across your enterprise, key components of project portfolio management and integrated risk management can also be leveraged alongside ESGM to provide your organisation with a holistic, integrated ESG Command Center.
Contact us today to learn more, and to kick start your ESG transformation.
