Reporting Standard

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Choosing a reporting standard

A crucial issue for CR practitioners is which standards to adopt. You should seek standards that won't be just documents pulled out at reporting time, but integrated into company strategy to become a key part of company goals and values.

But what is a standard? How will you use the standard you choose? Will it address internal and external activity? Will it address human rights? Will your performance against the standard be publicly reported? How will the board be involved?

Go into the field and find CR standards that are specific and have metrics, which are:
1. Multi-stakeholder: Transparently developed by a multi-stakeholder coalition of subject experts. Check if the standard was developed in accordance with ISEAL's (the International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labelling (ISEAL) Alliance) guidelines.Find a standard that's undergone complex and robust development, where stakeholder concerns, expertise and different sectors and points of view contributed to its completeness, materiality and clarity. Its credibility derives from being developed in a multi-stakeholder, consensus-based process, periodically revised, reviewed and commented on by users.
2. Verifiable: Clearly written and specific enough for performance against it to be verified, even though not all users seek external verification.
3. Legitimate: Based on established, defined and widely accepted principles, the SA8000 for example.
4. Comprehensive and appropriate: Include the issues your stakeholders consider important and expect you to address. Make it clear to your stakeholders what you aspire to and commit to, so they can rally around. It's a big job to work to meet any of the sustainability standards around. You don't want to distract from that by choosing a weak standard.
5. Appropriate: In coverage and requirements. An environmental standard today needs to speak to global warming, for example.People often comment, "there are thousands of standards, many are very specific, to industry, to product type." Sometimes in the past there's been a paralysis: too many choices, "let's wait on the sideline until the dust clears and there's only one path."

Some currently are tempted to do that and wait for ISO26000 (a new Social Responsibility (SR) standard). However, ISO26000 is not going to be a performance standard but management guidelines on how to use standards that a company chooses according to its specific CR criteria.Once you've surveyed the field and agreed with stakeholders on the standard(s) that you will use, it's time for the real work to begin.

Excerpted from "Choosing a reporting standard" by Eileen Kohl Kaufman in the current issue of Corporate Responsibility Management.

Blogged on 1:33 AM by Upay

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