In today’s evolving corporate landscape, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance has become a cornerstone of responsible business practice. And while quantitative metrics provide essential benchmarks, the true depth of an organization’s ESG impact often lies in qualitative sustainability data.
In this article we will explore how companies can leverage qualitative insights to enhance their ESG strategies. By integrating these nuanced perspectives, businesses can not only meet compliance requirements but also drive meaningful change, build trust with stakeholders, and unlock long-term value.
Table of Contents
The need for qualitative sustainability data
Quantitative sustainability data has, understandably, taken a lead spot at company’s ESG management strategies. However, this does not mean qualitative data should go unnoticed, because, while quantitative data can portray what a company is doing to tackle sustainability issues, it does not portray how or why they are doing so.
Qualitative data is not only necessary, it is absolutely crucial to the success of ESG strategies, as it actually provides the context behind the numbers, like, for example, the motivations behind the strategies, or the challenges faced by stakeholders and the company itself in the journey towards sustainability.
Qualitative sustainability data can also help explain how both internal and external factors influence a company’s sustainability goals. For instance, organizations’ corporate culture can greatly impact sustainable actions; similarly, regulations or market trends are key to developing ESG strategies.
Engage employees in the sustainability strategy
Another great example of the need to search deeper into qualitative sustainability data is when trying to understand progress. While quantitative data provides a clear vision on how the company has evolved (or not) on specific metrics, qualitative data is the information we need to see how the company has learned from its experiences and has managed to overcome obstacles and adverse circumstances.
Measuring sustainable impact and value beyond results
Measuring quantitative results is absolutely imperative to business performance, and, to some extent, it is what many C-Suite personnel look for most emphatically. Nonetheless, we can only read one side of the story if we focus on outputs or outcomes.
Qualitative sustainability insights can tell the other very important half of the story, helping organizations understand the impacts, value and benefits their sustainability actions and initiatives have among employees, consumers, suppliers and other relevant stakeholders.
For example, qualitative data can show how an organization’s sustainability practices improve employee satisfaction, customer loyalty, supplier relationships, community engagement, or environmental quality.
Leveraging qualitative sustainability data for engagement
As we’ve seen up until now, qualitative data can help companies dig deeper into their outcomes, numbers and facts. Understanding the nuance of results is the key to improvement overtime. There is no use in knowing that there’s been improvement regarding a given metric if we can’t even point out why, because, how can companies ensure they will repeat this exact recipe for success?
And, in the topic of digging deeper, qualitative sustainability data can capture the perspectives and opinions of the people who are affected by or involved in the organization’s sustainable actions.
In this regard, qualitataive data is a basic and much needed component of double materiality analyses, as it helps organizations understand how stakeholders perceive the company’s sustainability strengths and weaknesses, or opportunities and risks.
How to approach a Double Materiality Assessment
The efforts made to build a credible and detailed double materiality assessment shouldn’t be left at that. Indeed double materiality is a crucial aspect companies need to tackle in order to understand how and why to act upon certain sustainability issues, but the best way to deliver such analyses is by taking a collaborative approach.
In this regard, qualitative sustainability data should enable stakeholder engagement, dialogue or collaboration in the organization’s sustainability decision-making, planning and even implementation.
Engaging employees in the ESG strategy
In DoGood, we aim to simplify the complex web of sustainability objectives for companies by offering a platform that translates the high-level ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) objectives into actionable tasks for every single employee.
Then, each employee not only knows how to make an impact but also feels empowered to contribute meaningfully to the greater sustainable strategy.
No more vague directives. No confusion. DoGood automates the process, making it seamless for the workforce to know precisely what steps to take.
