Ledernes Hovedorganisation

ESG is increasingly setting the standards for how internal as well as external stakeholders set their requirements towards companies' abilities to reduce environmental impact, improve social equality and govern company operations responsibly.

However, understanding what ESG is, how to apply it to your own company and ultimately document and communicate your efforts and goals to stakeholders is a huge barrier to most small and medium-sized enterprises (SME).

We assisted Lederne in conceptualizing, designing and developing the ESG Profile – a tool for SMEs looking to both learn and work with ESG in practice.

The tool can be used for collecting relevant ESG information, hosting workshops with internal and providing documentation for external stakeholders. The ESG Profile continually provides the users with simple overviews of current ESG efforts, stakeholder expectations and demands, strategic priorities and key ESG metrics.

The ESG Profile takes its users by the hand and guides them through four tasks that can be performed without any prior experience in working with ESG:

• Map current efforts
  The first task is to map your current initiatives and establish a baseline, showing what ESG efforts the company does today, which can be used as a reference point for future comparisons.
• Identify stakeholder expectations
  The second task is a stakeholder analysis, which identifies your internal and external stakeholders and their expectations of your company.
• Prioritise focus areas
  The third task is a materiality analysis, where the strategic work with ESG begins. Based on the previous tasks, you prioritize and focus on specific ESG areas.
• Calculate key ESG metrics
  The fourth task is a calculation of key ESG metrics. These metrics can be used to document various ESG aspects of the company for both internal and external communication and as a baseline for the future.

Apart from using and updating the ESG Profile continuously, as your company improves on different ESG aspects, the results can also be exported and shared with external stakeholders who require documentation on your company’s ESG efforts and goals.

The ESG Profile is created by Lederne through involvement of their members and in collaboration with experts from Deloitte and Danske Bank.