Starting a sustainability report from scratch may seem like a lot of work. When is it time during the business year to start thinking about the next report and begin project management?

“Wow, what a big question from your side. First, we must clarify one thing. The sustainability report is the last piece of a much more complicated puzzle. A company doesn’t decide to produce a sustainability report, but decides to start a sustainability journey of which the report is the explanation to the stakeholders. Therefore, it is not just a matter of writing a document, but it means preparing an assessment phase to take a snapshot of your company from an environmental, economic and social standpoint, setting improvement goals with respect to what emerged from the assessment, identifying the actions to achieve the objectives, and finally draw up a document that describes all these activities.
Therefore, we can say that the first sustainability report describes the current state of a company and outlines projects and activities to make it more sustainable in economic, environmental and social terms. In general, it is good to be supported by external consultants or to have a person who is an expert within your organization to be able to deal with this process, which effectively involves all company functions. From the second sustainability report on, the document describes the results achieved in that year compared to the set objectives. Generally, the sustainability report is published at the same time as the financial statement and you try to maintain that deadline for all years, even if it is not mandatory. However, it is different for listed companies, for example, which by law must follow a more specific and stringent calendar.”

How can a business organize itself to gather all the information and data necessary to create an effective and relevant report?

“An important thing that I didn’t mention before is that the report is an important tool for the company, but as well to various stakeholders who are important for the company itself. This means that all the projects that are set up must in some way be interesting also for employees, clients, suppliers, communities, etc., so both outside and inside the company. And this is why, before drawing up the first report, among all the analysis that are conducted, it’s important to identify which are the company’s stakeholders. Let’s now return to your question: how we organize ourselves to collect the necessary data and information? It depends a lot on whether the company is very small, medium, large or very large. For small companies or startup, data collection can be done via Excel. So all data are entered manually and then checked quarterly on a six-month basis. Obviously, you need a person who knows how to work very well with this tool.
When the company is a medium or large or listed company, or significant size, it can rely on specific tools that allow to collect, process and report the data related to the various projects and processes, which will subsequently be commented on and described in the sustainability report. An important thing is that these tools enable the organizations to measure, monitor and manage their ESG performances.”

Thank you for that. That actually leads me to my next question: which were the main difficulties that you encountered during the process? Was it helpful working with an external company specializing in reporting?

“In my experience, the big challenge we faced was to convince people that we were not asking for another set collection as the many ones asked from other colleagues for different scopes. So, we explained to them the importance of the journey we started and also developed a claim under which all our sustainable projects and activities were included. I’m talking about The Eco Pledge, Aquafil’s path toward full sustainability. This helped us to onboard all Aquafil people involved to join and help, because it was clear to everybody that the only way to be sustainable was to be transparent and to report all our goals and projects, even if sometimes we didn’t achieve them as predicted. Thanks to the teamwork we managed to implement a custom flow that has guaranteed us the drafting of reports all these years.
Certainly, the support of external consultants also for writing the report was, actually is, very important, as the topics to be described are complicated and need to be somehow translated into a simple and understandable language that can be understood by all the stakeholders. And believe me, it’s very easy somehow to describe things in a very technical way because we have expert to do so, but make sure that those very technical things are written in an engaging and simple way, it’s a completely different ballroom.”

Thank you Maria Giovanna. I wanted to mention, in some previous conversations you told us that you went through a renovation process for the report, from a more bureaucratic and institutional one to a more modern way of reporting. Which main changes did you implement and did they result in something useful for legitimizing Aquafil in stakeholders’ eyes?

“Aquafil is a listed company with the obligation to prepare a NFS, that’s a Non-Financial Statement, which must satisfy certain regulatory requirements. Being that said, it means that along with the technicalities to describe some of the projects, there are also info to be included requested by the law, so another type of technicalities. So, how to make a real complex document engaging for our publics and make them not only read but also understand what Aquafil does or will do? We developed an additional document to our NFS that, while respecting the regulatory requirements, addresses stakeholders in a simpler and more understandable way.”

Thank you. So, can you give our listeners three tips on how to manage the whole process of sustainability reporting?

“That’s another tough question, by the way. I think that we need to create a team with a project manager and very specific roles within the team. Another tip could be: stay updated as regulations change very quickly. And last but not least: create a relationship of trust with your stakeholders to be able to collaborate better.”