Giving Compass' Take:

• Raz Godelnik argues that CSR reports be distilled into two gauges - one measuring treatment of stakeholders and the other measuring climate change progress. 

• Is this system oversimplified? How should treatment of employees, other environmental damage, etc. play into this process? 

• Learn more about the importance of strong communication. 

How might sustainability reports provide clarity on how companies address their social and environmental impacts, and at the same time can be read in 30 seconds and understood by 5-year-olds?

Let me explain.

Sustainability reporting (aka corporate responsibility or CSR reporting) represents (almost) everything that is wrong with sustainability-as-usual – these long and complex reports celebrate all sorts of progress, without giving the reader any clear indication if the progress described in the report is good enough. This is partially because there is no clear benchmark for ‘good enough’, and partially because of an incrementalist mindset dominating the sustainability-as-usual sandbox. Add to it reporting formats that change from company to company and thus make it almost impossible to compare companies, even when they are grounded in the same reporting standards, and you end up with reports that very few read and even fewer can make sense of.

What do we want from companies?

I’ll go into the specifics of this question in more detail in another article, but for now let me put it this way – in the new sandbox we should expect every company to do the following:

  1. Take climate change seriously and respond with urgency.
  2. Treat stakeholders responsibly.

My suggestion therefore is that companies will report on their progress using a dashboard with two gauges, one for their climate change response and the other for their stakeholder relationships. These gauges provide an intuitive sense of how well companies are doing with each goal.

Read the full article about CSR reports by Raz Godelnik at TriplePundit.