Preparing for CSRD: Intergrating New Expertise and Thinking into Estabished Reporting and Decision-Making

2024 is the first full year of reporting for the Corporate Social Responsibility Directive (CSRD) in the EU. Companies in scope will now have to provide extensive reporting on their sustainability policies, actions and targets within their company reports. We wrote recently about the impact on the wider business community as time goes on. Many will want to know what they can do now to prepare for customer, compliance and legislative requests going forward. How can we marry new expertise and new thinking into established reporting and decision-making?

Reminder on CSRD

The Corporate Social Reporting Directive will apply to companies in the EU and their supply chain within a few short years. In total, there are 82 reporting requirements and 1,144 data points on ESG issues.

The below table sums up the key topics companies need to provide to European customers and investors.

Environment	Social	Governance
Climate Change	Own workforce	Business conduct
Pollution	Workforce in the supply chain
Water and marine resources	Affected local societies
Biodiversity and ecosystems	Consumers and End-users
Resources, consumption and circular economy

Breaking it Down

Reporting in all these categories can be a daunting task. However, some of the information may be available already. For example,

“Own workforce” covers working conditions, health and safety, equal opportunities and other legal requirements, such as child labour. It’s probably in your employee handbook.

“Workers in the value chain” covers the same issues for suppliers, so is covered by supplier questionnaires.

“Business conduct” contains standard expectations on bribery, whistleblowing, payment practices etc. (Again, this is likely in the employee handbook.)

The Environmental categories are a little newer and trickier for most organisations. Business plans may include climate adaptation and risk assessment. However, policies, actions and targets on biodiversity, pollution and water and marine resources might be less clear.

Making a Plan for CSRD

There are an increasing number of software products and consultancies ready to generate CSRD reports. However, outsourcing expertise is likely to prove expensive long term. Sector specific and SME specific reporting is still under development and will be added at a later date, which means you need to develop a dynamic plan for future reporting as well.

Many companies are looking to build in-house sustainability departments. There is an explosion in demand for sustainability professionals in the corporate sector, especially those with ESG experience. However, these subject matter experts often lack an in-depth understanding of the business or its needs.

With all this in mind, a hybrid approach of recruiting experts and training existing employees works well. It provides everyone with the basic principles they need to support the sustainability department to report properly and execute change.

Creating a Community

We have been training our staff on Sustainability fundamentals for three years. It has helped with engagement across the company, helped us to reduce our paper usage by 30%, virgin plastics by 90% and consolidate courier shipments.

Having a shared language means everyone can contribute to our sustainability performance with external frameworks like EcoVadis, which in turn helps us with customer questionnaires.

Since becoming an IEMA-accredited Sustainability and Carbon training centre in 2022, we have delivered courses Management to hundreds of people from all kinds of organisations. We combine technical theory on reporting, change management and engagement with our own experience as a growing SME.

If you would like to talk about how this environment can help you and your organisation with reporting, please get in touch.

Techbuyer can help upskill your organisation in the following ways: