Just under two fifths of chief executive officers (39.1%) are taking responsibility for sustainability actions at their businesses, a new study by SAP has found.
SAP asked businesses to identify who within their firms ‘has been assigned accountability for your organisations efforts to improve environmental sustainability’, with a wide variety of roles cited by firms.
Taking the top position are environment/sustainability managers (40.8%), followed by chief executives, and then chief sustainability officers (38.7%).
Other corporate roles cited include chief operating officers (20.4%), chief technology officers (16.8%), chief financial officers (16.6%), risk managers (15.4%) and energy managers (14.5%).
Just over a fifth of firms (21.8%) said that they had one individual tasked with overseeing sustainability efforts, while 27.9% answered that two individuals were involved, and 15.0% answered three.
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A business strategy
“We see in the research how many companies are shifting to view sustainability no longer as a regulatory compliance tactic, but becoming more of a strategy to actually build business value,” commented Sarah Dziuk, SAP Insights Head of Research, said.
The ‘Wave 3 sustainability study’ includes results from 4,750 respondents across 21 nations and 29 industries. Some 85% of responses came from ‘mid-market’ businesses (under $1 billion annual turnover) and 15% from ‘large’ enterprises (over US$1 billion turnover per year).
Strategic pillar
The top 25% of businesses, who indicated the most significant influence from sustainability on their operations, approach it as a strategic pillar comparable to other aspects like IT, SAP’s study found.
With this in mind, said firms exhibit increased reliance on metrics for decision-making, heightened investment, greater satisfaction with data, and increased confidence in achieving returns on investment within a one-to-three year timeframe, SAP said.
This, in turn, has resulted in favourable business outcomes such as growth, enhanced profitability, improved efficiency, higher quality products and services, and reduced costs.
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