Corporate businesses worldwide are adopting a growing array of environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies to promote sustainability – but are their operations keeping up?
Rising standards for corporate performance are putting pressure on the private sector to raise its game in terms of ESG, according to Darryll Kilian partner and principal environmental consultant at the global firm of engineers and scientists, SRK Consulting. “This means that companies must stay up to date with fast-changing requirements, but at the same time must understand how their operations on the ground need to respond,” said Kilian. “Our work in the field of water stewardship, for example, shows that companies achieve quite variable rates of success when implementing corporate decisions at operational level.” He pointed out that corporate strategic efforts are usually driven from head office and board level, and are expected to be uniformly rolled out by group operations to equivalent standards. However, this practical implementation often faces considerable challenges, especially where there is misalignment between the corporate vision and the operations’ daily concerns. “Many large companies struggle to turn visionary ambitions into action,” he said. “An important factor here is when head office is not fully cognisant of the day-to-day frustrations of their on-site staff, or if their operations are not on board with headquarters’ plans.”What else to read
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