Together with Robert Eccles, Alison Taylor, and Salesforce, we recently interviewed senior professionals across finance, technology, and sustainability functions to identify the major gaps that stand in the way of sustainability creating value for corporate strategy.
Our research identified an implementation gap where our respondents see sustainability delivering the most value in areas of marketing and PR, namely enhancing the company’s brand and reputation, strengthening stakeholder and community relationships, and facilitating partnerships and collaborations. Though important, the financial value of these can be harder to measure. Fewer respondents see value coming from areas directly linked to core operations that often have more direct commercial measures such as growing sales, attracting more investments, and reducing costs. These operational and measurable areas of the bottom line are the areas that senior management teams most often discuss and use to make their capital allocation decisions. It is therefore not surprising that the claimed senior support for sustainability does not turn into committed resources.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?
Find out more about how to close the four main gaps that hinder sustainability value creation in our new report Sustainable Value Creation: Closing the Gap between Stated Commitments and Operational Realities
Question: Please rate how much value each of the following sustainability actions is delivering for your organization.
Source: GlobeScan/Salesforce Value of Sustainability Project, a survey of 234 senior professionals in finance, technology, and sustainability functions
