Speaker 1: GRI reporting is the perfect way to take your business sustainability efforts to the next level. That's why in this video I will talk you through how you can level up and get started in just three steps. But before we continue, make sure you subscribe to my channel and hit the bell to get notified every time I post a new video about sustainability and ESG for business. As a qualified GRI professional, I work with small, medium and large businesses to help them deliver on their sustainability goals. And no matter the size of the business, I always use the principles behind GRI to enable the most effective sustainability practice. But what is GRI? Well, GRI is short for the Global Reporting Initiative, and it is the only UN-endorsed reporting framework, because it fully recognizes the importance of environmental, social and economic parameters to be instrumental in solving our sustainability challenges. By going through three steps or phases to really understand where the business is, the organization can then set specific and measurable targets to achieve it in a certain timeframe. And let me be clear, reporting is not a box-ticking exercise. Instead, it's a way of building a sustainability strategy and making the efforts matter. There are two ways of writing a GRI report. You can either write it with reference to GRI, or you can write it in accordance with GRI. If you're writing your sustainability report in accordance with GRI, it essentially means that you have been following the process to a T, and you know exactly how to measure and track all of your sustainability efforts. If you're just starting out, I recommend that you publish your first report with reference to, because it is a way of signaling to the world that you're taking sustainability super serious, and you're likely to go all in as soon as you have your governance in place. I would love to know if your business is already focused on sustainability, and if you're thinking about using GRI to level up your efforts. So GRI consists of three phases, and the first phase is the foundational phase, and it's actually quite simple. It's where you're just gathering information about the requirements that are needed for you to undergo this entire process, and it's also asking you to document how you're going to go about the reporting principles. By applying the reporting principles, it's making sure that your efforts are of the best possible quality, and it's asking you to reflect upon how you're achieving accuracy, how you're achieving balance, how you're achieving clarity, comparability in the report, so what's happening in the wider part of the industry, how do you benchmark against that. They want to make sure that you are applying contextual knowledge to your specific sector. They want to make sure that your efforts are coming out in a timely manner, and of course that everything is very viable. Once you've finished the first part, you are ready to move into the second part, which is the general disclosures, and the general disclosures is actually not too difficult, because it's noting down everything about the organization following a list of requirements. I think this phase is super exciting, because it's not just noting down the name of your business, how many people you are, what you're doing, and where you're operating, but it is going a step deeper, where you'll really be looking at mapping your value chain, understanding your leadership structures, what policies you have in place, and how you're navigating and mitigating risks. So, once you're understanding this, you have this exciting opportunity to see your business in relationship to change and sustainability. Once you've established a thorough understanding of your contextual environment, you're ready to move into the third phase. So, the third phase is called the material topics phase, and it's a super exciting exercise, because you will be asked to perform what's called double materiality, and essentially it is inviting stakeholders all around your business to give their input into how they see your performance on different sustainability parameters. So, that can be your upstream suppliers, it can be your customers, it can be your employees, it can be people in your local community, or maybe even investors and financial institutions. So, you will ask them to give their input on what it is that you are doing as a business, but also what's important to them. And in that way, you can start mapping out a full context of different positive and negative sustainability impacts. So, once you've gathered all this data and you fully understand your business impact across social and environmental and economic topics, you're ready to go ahead and set SMART targets. And SMART targets have to be specific, measurable, achievable, and time-bound. Once you have set your targets, you're ready to write your sustainability report in a very prescriptive format. And as I said earlier, you have to do it either with reference to GRI or in accordance with. I would suggest you start out with reference to. If you're interested in knowing more about sustainability and GRI reporting, don't hesitate to reach out to me and my team. I've left a link for you in the description below. If you like this video, you should totally check out this video, where we'll be talking about how to build a sustainable brand by finding inspiration in the fantastic business Patagonia.