Sustainability Strategy Design & Delivery
Comprehensive Sustainability Strategies for all Businesses
Developing a robust sustainability strategy enables businesses to not only maintain profitability but also manage risks, better meet stakeholder expectations, and maintain a competitive advantage in the industry. A well-designed sustainability strategy assists in embedding sustainability into corporate strategy and risk management, while transparently communicating performance against goals and targets to customers and stakeholders.
A fit-for-purpose sustainability strategy also helps businesses identify sustainability issues, risks, and opportunities for long-term success. It allows you to align action with best practice and robust international frameworks and standards. A well-crafted sustainability strategy builds your company’s resilience against market fluctuations and prepares you for regulatory changes.
Cress Consulting actively identifies pathways and applies practical, pragmatic solutions to ensure your business continues to thrive in a challenging and evolving environment.
Identifying Key Issues
Identifying material issues involves a comprehensive analysis of potential environmental, social, economic and governance topics that could positively and negatively impact an organisation’s financial performance, reputation, or ability to achieve its strategic objectives, as well as the relative potential for the business to impact an issue. Understanding key issues assists in highlighting areas of potential value creation, managing risks, prioritising internal resources, and making informed decisions.
Analysing Your Stakeholders
Identifying stakeholder concerns involves actively engaging and communicating with stakeholders to understand their needs, expectations, and potential areas of conflict to inform decision-making and mitigate risk. Understanding the sustainability position of key suppliers, peers and competitors, and the expectations and requirements from government stakeholders can be extremely useful for internal goal setting and defining sustainability ambition.
Stakeholders are those that have some sort of influence, involvement, concern, investment, interest or view in your business or operations. Cress can help you identify and map your key stakeholders. Understanding stakeholder views, interests, and concerns helps you be better prepared and able to work through any issues before they become problems. It can also identify if there are any synergies to take advantage of together.
A Robust Gap Analysis is your First Key Step
A gap analysis is the key first step to inform an effective and realistic sustainability strategy. It allows you to determine the current state of your efforts in relation to ambitions. Sustainability ambitions vary by company based on appetite and willingness to take on risks and the level of commitment to invest resources and achieve set goals.
Sometimes called ethical or responsible sourcing, sustainable procurement describes the process of integrating environmental and social considerations into the procurement process to reduce the cost and risk associated with adverse impacts on health, social conditions or the environment. Aligning sustainable procurement with your business objectives, designing and implementing a sustainable procurement policy and working with suppliers to set goals and establish baselines are just some of the ways Cress can help your business become more sustainable and reduce risk.
An organisation’s current performance and ambition can be visualised by two separate trajectories: one reflecting its current path if operations remain unchanged, and another that shows the path of ambition—what might be possible if significant strategic shifts are introduced. Highlighting both trajectories reveals the gap between where an organisation appears to be heading and where it strives to go. This ‘gap’ prompts a closer look at the actions needed to meet today’s expectations and trends, while taking a flexible and dynamic approach to tomorrow’s opportunities. A forward-looking strategy can unlock new levels of efficiency, profitability, and societal impact.
Cress can assist you in undertaking a comprehensive gap analysis to identify opportunities, address gaps, and define a robust plan to improve your sustainability performance.
Sustainability Strategy and Roadmap
A sustainability strategy and roadmap clearly outline goals, targets, accountabilities, resources, and can be defined for a short, medium and long term in alignment with the organisation’s sustainability ambition. Cress works closely with clients to identify ways to address the most significant issues in line with business ambition appetite while meeting stakeholder expectations and implementing practical actions for long-term success.
Implementation
An implementation plan expands upon a sustainability strategy and outlines clear actions, accountabilities and timeframes for each focus area to ensure efficient and effective execution of the sustainability goals. Cress carefully delivers its sustainability strategies with robust and clear roadmaps, allowing our clients to understand fully when and how they are progressing along their sustainability journey. We also provide ongoing support, including training, to assist with implementation.
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