The key to becoming a sustainable business is to have a sustainability scorecard that tracks progress, assesses your actions and measures results. As the old adage says, what gets measured gets done. And with GBB’s sustainability scorecard, you can hold yourself accountable while providing a formal structure for your sustainability program, with goals and KPIs that can be measured.

Benefits of Using a Sustainability Scorecard

Accountability

Hold your company and employees accountable.

Communication

Share your results with all stakeholders.

Program management

Establish a baseline and track your progress.

The key to the successful execution of any major program is accountability. Every person assigned to take some action has to be held accountable for their role and responsibility. This is only possible when you establish explicit goals and KPIs and then review the progress of those goals.

Accountability is important at the corporate, green team, and individual level, with specific goals established at each. These goals need to be captured and tracked. For GBB members, the most common goal is to complete the available initiatives listed in the GBB EcoPlanner.

For instance, an initiative for the current year might be “replace all lighting with energy-efficient alternatives like LEDs” or “replace our fuel-powered delivery vehicles with hybrid or electric vehicles”. These chosen initiatives become goals in your sustainability plan. Tracking whether the people or teams assigned to a given initiative complete them brings accountability to the organization.

To be successful, a sustainability program must include a communication plan. This includes a launch plan, training plan, communicating goals, KPIs, and periodic status and progress reports.

Just like report cards communicate a student’s performance, a sustainability scorecard can communicate a company’s sustainability performance. Instead of course, the sustainability scorecard might list functional areas for both environmental (energy, waste, recycling, buildings, packaging, supply chain, food) and social responsibility (diversity, inclusion, gender equality, worker wellbeing, fair wages, community support, and charity contributions). The scorecard will show a percentage to indicate what initiatives are complete, and will give the total points plus an overall grade. GBB uses a point system to show how many points you scored out of a max potential points total.

A sustainability program needs to be managed like any other major initiative or project in the company. There are goals, task owners, deliverables, milestones, due dates, critical paths, status reports, etc.

With this in mind, at the heart of a GBB-based sustainability program is the scorecard. It becomes a key framework for creating your program structure and goals. GBB initiatives become the major tasks for the program and the steps for each initiative become the sub-tasks. The GBB initiative library provides you with the structure you need to create your sustainability plan and manage your program.

Maintaining a scorecard engages your employees, creates a deeper understanding of sustainability and demonstrates your commitment to being a sustainable business. But a scorecard also motivates people to improve their scores. It’s human nature. Green Business Bureau uses a point system to credit companies for completed initiatives. This adds a “gamification” aspect to the GBB scorecard that drives green teams to set target points each quarter and year, resulting in more getting done.