ESG on the Clock: What is ESG?

Key Takeaways

ESG on the Clock is designed for those starting their environmental, social, and governance journey.

In our first episode, you’ll hear from Mandi McReynolds, VP, Global Environmental, Social, and Governance at Workiva, as she details four steps to kickstart ESG reporting and ESG strategy within your organization.

S1 Episode 1: What is ESG? | Transcript

Mandi McReynolds:

Hello and welcome to the ESG on the Clock video series. This series is designed just for you—those who are starting their environmental, social, and governance journey. Whether you've been voluntold or you're kickstarting a new process for your organization, we're here to help you out.

Throughout this series, we'll be diving deep into collecting data, materiality assessment, things to help you get ready for audit and frameworks. It's all about giving you the 101 basics so that you can fire up your team and organization to meet the stakeholder demands you have for environmental, social, and governance.

Now, I don't know about you, but when I started my environmental, social, and governance journey for different organizations, I had to really take a step back and ask myself the question, where on earth do we start? It's acronym soup. There's a lot going on. What can I do to tackle this? And what I found are four very easy steps.

First, it was identifying our stakeholders. It was taking time with our executive team or finance and ESG-designated person to sit down and say, who are our key stakeholders that we care about most, that want to know about our environmental, social, and governance story, journey, and data. So you may identify things like employees, your board, founders, investors, looking internally to more stakeholders that could be things that your organization work across with the supply chain.

Next, you build your team. Who are the executives and team members that are best suited to provide the data, information, and input on your environmental, social, and governance strategy? That could be your finance team, your ESG team, HR team, or those who handle philanthropy and community engagement in your organization.

The next step that you have is researching industry leaders and looking at your peers, seeing what they disclose in their ESG report. This is a nice step to see what's going on in your industry and determine what might be key information that you would like to disclose to your stakeholders.

And then finally, the last step is building a roadmap, really starting on the journey where you look and see what are the metrics and values that matter most to an organization, mapping the journey to achieve your goals for ESG reporting, and your overall ESG performance so that you and your company can thrive and meet the stakeholder demands.

We'll have for you a little bit more about our ESG 101 guide. Stay tuned to the series ahead. We're here for you. Whether you've been voluntold or you're just starting your ESG journey, our goal is to make the complex simple and help you thrive so that you can have great impact.