Whether I lie awake thinking about a reporting component in the green deal? On the contrary. In this blog, I would like to take you through my experiences and show you the opportunities offered by the Corporate Sustainabillity Reporting Directive (CSRD). Discover how you, as an organisation, can become a forerunner and set standards in sustainable reporting.

Impact of ESG on the ecosystem and future of organisations

Making impact measurable with data, accounting for ESG externally in a structured way and developing management information are just a few examples of the cool work I do. First only at financial institutions but now also with clients in manufacturing and service industries.

What makes this work really interesting is that it largely takes place around the client, in the immediately adjacent ecosystem. In addition, it requires in-house staff to suddenly pick up new information and tasks. We often hear how valuable it is for us to support upskilling and reskilling employees, because it actually means reinventing the work. In some cases, this can even upskill your entire business in the future.

CSRD: more transparency and sustainable activities in Europe

The driver of all this is the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), cleverly used by the European Union to encourage sustainable activities. It requires companies in Europe to be transparent about their ESG-related activities and to take a critical look at themselves. Since 5 January 2023, more and more companies, from large to small, are subject to more modern and stringent rules around ESG disclosure. Interestingly, the pressure is already increasing, even for companies that will not be required to report until later, as larger companies in the value chain are already asking for data disclosure.

From obligation to opportunity

Fortunately, these obligations also offer opportunities, such as the possibility of becoming a forerunner and setting standards in reporting on, for example, the treatment of workers in your chain. It offers room to develop creative new initiatives, because if you have to report a broad set anyway, there are also many opportunities for your own organisation. Within Social, you can make a difference by focusing on diversity and inclusion, equal pay, CEO ratio or innovative methods to report safety as perceived by employees.

I think we still have a long way to go together, but I am inspired by the energy and passion I see in my clients. It is essential to realise that just buying a reporting solution is not enough to exploit all the possibilities. After all, as an organisation, you also want to be able to use the data collected to achieve your strategic goals. Therefore, it is important to create a highly agile data collection foundation that merges ESG data and financial data.