What’s the Bottom Line of Sustainability?

One of the great challenges facing sustainability, especially business sustainability, is the ability to measure success.  This challenge is has only intensified by growing eco awareness and resulting expectations to show progress.  Leading sustainability minded organizations still struggle to justify resources and define benefits of implementing sustainability concepts.  Without a universally accepted set of criteria, business sustainability is especially hard for many companies to define and measure.

There are approximately 70 business excellence frameworks used around the world, including the Baldrige Performance Excellence Framework here in the United States and the EFQM Excellence Framework in Europe.  These tend to focus on business practices that do not necessarily include sustainability concepts, let alone, business sustainability measurement.

Through our sustainability consulting, we find promoters of sustainability measurement simply wanting the business world to evaluate the social and environmental bottom lines equally as seriously as the financial bottom line.  However, critics of popular frameworks, like the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) , comment that the concept itself promises or implies something that is very difficult to deliver.  While the theory is simple, the challenge is developing a methodology for calculating social and environmental progress with financial rigor.

The search for this common link may have slowed TBL aggregate measurement, but it has not limited progress.  The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)  offers a set of 79 universal indicators and guidelines for sustainability reporting.

The G3 guidelines offer:

•    Principles to define report content

•    Principles to define report quality

•    Guidance on how to set report boundaries

•    Guidance on how to plot a path for continual improvement

The Australian Business Excellence Framework (ABEF)  is an integrated leadership and management system that describes the elements essential to sustainable organizational excellence, which provides a closer tie to the financial bottom line.  The Approach, Deployment, Results and Improvement  (ADRI) assessment matrix is used to examine organizational performance.

Business Sustainability Reporting represents an important step in sustainable development.  It reflects executive commitment to transparency and accountability.  By disclosing information on its sustainability plan, companies increase credibility and confidence with stakeholders.