How can comms teams get all their colleagues excited about the opportunities from CSRD? Nanette spoke to Janet Hitchen CIIC, a internal communication leader who has worked with global brands and now specialises in sustainability.

Nanette: Why should colleagues outside of Finance, Sustainability and Comms care about CSRD?

Janet: CSRD means Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. It feels quite dry, doesn’t it. 

Does anyone really care about anything that feels jargon-filled and deliberately unwelcoming? 

But I do care about the planet and our place on it and according to the WeSpire Report 2023, 42% of employees feel the same and would leave their job for one that is making a greater impact on the world. 

And while 49% of employees say that their organisation is “making a positive impact” that means a whopping 51% aren’t. This is disturbing as we speed towards 2030 which is the formal deadline for the Paris Agreement. 

So, taking this into consideration, bringing to life these goals and inviting employees to the conversation is essential. We all need to be all in. 

However, the Gallagher State of the Sector Report 2023 showed that only 34% of respondents felt their organisation has a clear sustainability strategy. Oh dear. 

In my view, this space is bursting with opportunities for internal communication teams to do what they do best: connect the dots between CSRD reporting, business strategy and what employees care about. Call it engagement, call it alignment, call it focus. 

If this is about being a responsible business prioritising the planet, people, communities, and profit, then encouraging everyone in the organisation to contribute to its success, should be a no-brainer.

Nanette: So how do you nurture the necessary collaboration between teams when it comes to collecting the right data and feeding it into the annual report?

Janet: As CSRD reporting takes the spotlight, it’s important to help your people understand what this is, why it’s happening, and why they should care. 

As I said earlier, 34% of respondents from the Gallagher State of the Sector Report 2023 think their company’s sustainability strategy is clear. Start here. Are your employees better or worse than 34%? If you don’t know, ask them. 

Then, tell people how it all works. Tell them why you are asking for certain information. Tell them why you are asking them to do new work for them (providing data, figures, project details etc). If you help them to understand, they’re more likely to be gracious about the new work. 

Starting with the why helps (thanks Simon Sinek), as does making this new work not feel like a chore. So, look for opportunities to:

  • automate,
  • create APIs between systems, 
  • make data available and create a self-serve option.

The biggest thing here is having robust processes and not expecting the communication to magically make better a shoddy process. 

When it comes to communication, though, you need to establish your sustainability narrative and weave it through everything you do and be sure it makes sense in relation to the employee touch points you have i.e. make sure there are no ‘say/do’ gaps.

And remember, this is not a once-a-year campaign you spin up when the reporting is shared, only to forget about until next year. 

Consider how your sustainability narrative fits with your company purpose and goals? How does it fit with your People narrative? All of these need to complement each other and work together to avoid confusion. This might sound complicated, but it isn’t. This is about simplifying and refining for clarity and focus. 

Internal communicators are well placed to connect the dots and provide an overarching business narrative that they bring to life, igniting agency across the organisation. 

Why internal communicators? Because they are one of the rare groups to sit across all the different functions of the business, and they are focused on informing, connecting, aligning, and inspiring their people.

Nanette: Having regular and meaningful discussions with stakeholders – colleagues as well as the key external stakeholders – around reporting is no longer a nice-to-have. Ongoing dialogue is the only way companies can ensure that they are tuned in to their priorities and able to respond to them. But how, in your view can companies keep these conversations going?

Janet: Having on-going conversations doesn’t need to be onerous or complicated, but so often it gets mired in bureaucracy and red tape. 

I’m not a fan of the annual survey as usually the information is out of date within a matter of moments, and for many, there is a heavy process that has been developed around it that renders anything you may glean, at best, out of date and at worst, useless. 

A simple process is all you need, and if you’re in a big, matrix organisation start small and build. If you need permission to do something new, pilot! 

Figure out:

  • What you want to ask,
  • Who you want to get feedback from,
  • How often,

… and then go ask them

No need to make it more complicated. 

Also, you don’t need to ask everyone in the business all the time. A quick, targeted survey (max. 10 carefully chosen, targeted questions), followed up by a roundtable discussion to gain deeper insights and clarifications. Following this by sharing your findings and acting upon them with a regular drumbeat is far more effective than a yearly process that drowns in data that no-one does anything about.

Or you can set up a group of champions to share their feedback and bring insights from their business areas and to give feedback on action plans and spread the word with their teams. This can be a powerful way to involve employee groups. 

You can, of course, add something to an annual survey but in a VUCA world, I’ll let you decide if this process is agile enough. 

The key is to get consistent, regular inputs that you can work with, that allow you to refine and evolve the work you do and include employees in the process.

Nanette: How can companies work with reporting to make it a more dynamic, ongoing activity – rather than just a retrospective, once-a-year publication? 

Lots of companies are moving in this direction. And AI can be a really helpful tool here, enabling companies to capture and communicate their progress throughout the year, with more consistency and greater transparency.

I’m a huge fan of the work that the Australian-American software company, Atlassian do. I love how their reporting is split into three simple sections:

  • How we’re doing,
  • Where we’re going,
  • Where we fell short.

There’s an intention to acknowledge the actual state of play so they can constantly strive to do better.

The honesty is refreshing. It gives an opportunity for all stakeholders to think about how they can help with the last two categories. 

There’s a sense this work will never be done, and that’s OK as we’re in it together.