The end of 2016 is just around the corner and holiday season is here. This is also the season when sustainability reporting jitters begin. Sustainability officers, environmental managers and CSR professionals worldwide begin wondering what results will look like at year’s end and if targets and goals will indeed be met. Unfortunately, some are even unclear if and when the year-end data will be made available to them, as sustainability data collection requires a good many contributors throughout the corporation and many of the collection tools are clumsy and outdated, providing poor visibility during the year.
To avoid these jitters in the years to come, sustainability professionals will need to adopt a New Year resolution - to make 2016 the last year in which data is collected haphazardly after the year ends. There really is no reason to continue this practice in the 21st Century: cloud-based systems, such as ECO-OS, that provide a friendly operating system for corporate sustainability programs, enable monthly and quarterly data collection from a broad range of data systems, operations and individual operators with far less effort than is required by outdated enterprise systems or clumsy spreadsheets. Besides reducing the end-of-year stress, they also provide unprecedented visibility throughout the year, allowing better predictions of progress towards meeting goals and far more dynamic decision making and engagement capabilities.
In an era when leading sustainability executives are expected to re-focus their programs on creating actionable business-developing opportunities, ensuring you can make the most out of your data is critical. Enabling more frequent analysis will pay back in multiple ways, though reducing the intensity of end-of-year jitters should provide ample justification.
Happy Holiday Season - one and all!