All you need to know before hiring a sustainability manager
March 18, 2024
“Used correctly, EcoVadis can be much more than just a yardstick to measure progress. It can function as a strategic sounding board.” – Yeşim Tırpan, Junior Sustainability Consultant
With over 130,000 companies rated worldwide, the EcoVadis framework has become a global gold standard for monitoring and evaluating corporate sustainability practices – including supply chain impacts. An EcoVadis rating can therefore be a key milestone in a company’s sustainability strategy, facilitating stakeholder engagement and even access to finance.
However, given the complexity of the assessment process, it can be extremely useful to gain a deeper understanding of what’s behind the EcoVadis scoring methodology.
Yeşim Tırpan, Junior Sustainability Consultant, has helped many clients through their assessment journeys. In this interview, we unpack the specifics to help you optimise your sustainability management strategy for EcoVadis success.
01 / More than a score: Use the assessment process to inspire your strategy
Q: How can a company improve its EcoVadis score by using the EcoVadis framework to inspire its sustainability strategy?
Many companies, when they first encounter EcoVadis, perceive their rating as simply the product of their sustainability management system. However, when used correctly, EcoVadis can be much more than just a yardstick to measure progress. It can function as a strategic sounding board – an excellent way of highlighting both the strengths and weaknesses of your existing sustainability management system.
Even when clients come to EcoVadis following a request from a customer or supplier, we always encourage them to think of it as more than just a compliance tool. The request may have come from an external source, but it represents a valuable opportunity to assess and improve internal processes and systems. It’s also important for companies to remember that the EcoVadis assessment process itself isn’t a substitute for developing your own sustainability management framework.
Q: So, EcoVadis can inspire companies to create lasting change?
Exactly. Your EcoVadis assessment results will give you a clear indication of where you are currently on your sustainability maturity journey. You then need to take those results and use them to put together an improvement plan. And because the assessment covers such a comprehensive range of topics, it helps you to create a more impactful strategy that’s specific to your industry context.
02 / Best practices and next steps: Use the scorecard to benchmark progress
Q: How can a company use the scorecard to improve its EcoVadis score?
The detail provided by the EcoVadis scorecard can be a key catalyst for improvement. For example, the scorecard explains the reasoning behind the scores you’ve received for each category. It also provides information on areas for improvement, suggesting ways to develop policies, processes and reporting.
Crucially, you’ll also be able to see how your company stacks up against other companies in the same industry. This gives you insights into how you compare with other companies that have been rated by EcoVadis in each of the key sustainability pillars: environment, labour and human rights, ethics and sustainable procurement.
The scorecard also provides detailed information on best practices, as well as key procedures such as due diligence, and how to implement them. Companies can then use this information to improve their sustainability management systems. However, it’s not just about ‘weak’ areas. Companies can also use the scorecard to better understand their strengths and build on them when developing their strategy.
Q: That means there’s plenty of information to help companies make deep and holistic changes when it comes to sustainability management, right?
Absolutely. But to ensure that these changes can have an impact on your EcoVadis score, it’s so important to engage with the scorecards well in advance of your assessment. Often, clients will come to us just before a reassessment and ask us how they can make changes or improvements. At that stage, it’s often too late.
In fact, it’s best to start the improvement process as soon as you receive your initial scorecard. For example, updating formal processes and procedures usually requires management buy-in and a lot of stakeholder involvement – which takes time. Companies should therefore act quickly to develop an action plan for change as soon as they receive their scorecard. We can’t stress this enough.
03 / Transparent progress: Anticipating trends for competitive advantage
Q: How can anticipating industry sustainability trends help a company boost its EcoVadis rating?
The EcoVadis assessment can be a valuable source of information to help companies gain a competitive advantage. In addition to the benchmarking information it provides, it also informs you about the strengths and weaknesses of your industry as a whole, as well as key market trends. This can be valuable for those who want to be leaders in sustainability. It can also help secure management buy-in for sustainability initiatives – potentially facilitating changes that lead to a higher EcoVadis score.
04 / Stay organised: Optimise your document management system
Q: How can optimised document management help with improving your EcoVadis score?
EcoVadis is a document-based assessment, and you’re only allowed to upload 55 new documents with each submission. This means that some clients struggle to cover everything, especially because the documents are spread across the four sustainability pillars. Prioritising and staying organised is therefore crucial. This is particularly important for larger companies or those further along their sustainability maturity journey, as they often have many sustainability initiatives in play – and many more documents to manage.
Q. So, for each new assessment, organisations can upload 55 new documents. But what about the documents from previous assessments? Can you keep them within the system and reuse them, if relevant?
That’s an important point to clarify. These 55 new documents do not include those already uploaded in previous assessments. Many companies make the mistake of not reading their scorecard carefully before submission.
As a result, they don’t see where they’re already scoring highly and where there’s room for improvement. It’s always better to focus on the areas that need improvement and submit documents that address those areas. It’s like the old saying ‘if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it’. For example, if you’ve scored 99% in one area, you don’t need to update documents on that topic. Use your 55 new documents to address the areas that need improvement.
Q. For example, if you have 35 documents highlighting your company’s strengths, should you leave them all in there?
Definitely – it’s perfectly acceptable to reuse documents that you’ve already uploaded, as long as they’re still relevant and valid. Also, it’s important to be clear about the types of documents you need to upload – particularly the distinction between policies, procedures and reports.
Make sure you’re only uploading relevant documents, meaning policy documents for policy questions, procedural documents for procedures, and so on. It’s also key that the documents themselves provide all the relevant context needed to understand them. Remember that EcoVadis can only assess your company based on the documents you provide. They don’t have any more context than what you give them.
05 / Staying accountable: Setting roles and responsibilities
Q: Why is setting roles and responsibilities essential to ensure a smoother assessment process?
Given the amount of detailed work required to complete the EcoVadis assessment, establishing clear roles and responsibilities is the foundation of an effective EcoVadis assessment process. From adding page numbers and comments to ensuring that each document has been uploaded to the correct location, you need to cover all the bases – and this can only be achieved with a clear governance structure in place.
For example, some documents cover multiple pillars, so clear oversight and accountability are essential to avoid omissions. Everyone involved must therefore know who is responsible for what. To incentivise smooth cooperation, it can be helpful to set specific targets for sustainability or EcoVadis in particular. People will often show greater investment if they’re given specific goals – which helps to create more accountability around your organisation’s EcoVadis assessment process.
Q. Organisation and accountability are always so important – alignment too?
When it comes to defining roles and responsibilities, two key concepts are horizontal cohesion and vertical alignment. On the horizontal axis, you’ll want to have everyone in your organisation, across all departments, working in parallel towards the same goal. Vertically, you need to get the different levels of employees on board, including management, the board and all employees. It shouldn’t just be a small group trying to drag everyone’s attention towards sustainability or EcoVadis. Everyone needs to be paying attention and pulling in the same direction.
Q. Beyond that, how can you approach the EcoVadis assessment in terms of personnel?
There are two main approaches to defining roles and responsibilities. First, you can choose to have one central team of at least two people dedicated to the EcoVadis assessment process. This central team will coordinate with the subject matter experts and other stakeholders to collect and review all the necessary information. They’ll then submit the assessment themselves. An alternative approach would be to actively involve the subject matter experts in completing the questionnaire.
This focus on roles and responsibilities is important in two ways. On the one hand, it’s important to have clear roles and responsibilities for teams that are fully focused on collecting data and completing the EcoVadis assessment itself. On the other hand, ensuring clear roles and responsibilities throughout the organisation will help to improve the company’s sustainability management system as a whole – which will also be critical to improving your company’s EcoVadis score in the future.
Your EcoVadis journey with Nexio Projects
Key takeaways for companies looking to improve their EcoVadis score:
- Use EcoVadis as an inspiration to create a more comprehensive sustainability management system.
- Make full use of the information provided by the EcoVadis scorecard when implementing changes within your organisation.
- Use the EcoVadis results to anticipate industry trends, allowing you to gain a competitive advantage.
- Implement an effective document management system.
- Define clear roles and responsibilities within the organisation regarding the EcoVadis assessment itself and sustainability management in general.
Want to find out more about the EcoVadis assessment process and how to improve your sustainability performance? Sign up for our 2024 EcoVadis webinar series.
