Preparing your first Sustainability Report

Today's topic would be:

Preparing your first Sustainability Report

For those companies who are trying to prepare their first Sustainability Report, here are some tips which I learned from my own;

1. Identified all compliance standard which your company has already followed and reported
2. Do a linkage analysis between GRI indicators against each of those compliance you had (for example, against ISO 14001, OHSAS, ISO 26000, or some other specific indicators for forestry, plantation or mining that is locally applied or mandatory by certification). This is actually the hard part, since you will require to analyze each of indicator and learn more about the similarity and differences.This exercise is good so then in the future your team would not be having replication of data preparation and report which will create stress and negative enthusiasm when again they heard the company would have another indicators of compliance to follow.
3. Do only a short briefing which explained more on why we are doing this report, what is the impact if the report is good or bad, and how they could contribute to this report. And set a theme for your first report. This theme shall be different every year based on your group focus, this theme will help you and your theme identified which one of those reports and data will be selected as your this year progress story.
4. Have already a check list in your hand that has been separately identified per target group of department with indicators that they have to complete
5. Set a clear time line to monitor your data collection
6. Try different way of presenting report, by using interactive and creative way of producing charts, photos, etc
7. If you can't write then hired a professional writer to write your report, but do have a story line as your guidelines so you still be the leader of that report
8. Prepare your data always for previous, current and future plan with back up file up to five years document
9. Agreed with your management about which one you want to disclose and which one is not based on your company sensitivity
10. Create separate filing and database for all these supporting document and draft your prepare, since it would be an annual event
11. Lean from other companies who has published their report, and try to get the most similar type of company.
12. With the linkage exercise you have done, then your report would have multiple references, your report become an integrated report.

Good luck..