A company’s sustainability communication requires courage to be open

Sustainability is an essential part of business and social agency. In addition to responding to regulation or writing reports, sustainability supports and guides strategies and operational development. The company’s sustainability communication reinforces the value of the planned changes and the steps taken in the eyes of stakeholders, in creating social appreciation, and in achieving a social license.

Traditional corporate communication has been caricatured based on what the company itself wants to say about its own operations from its own point of view. Things have only been communicated when they have been certain and success has been confirmed. If the goals have been communicated, the way in which the goals are to be achieved has often been left undisclosed, citing trade secrets.

However, a company’s sustainability communication takes a completely different perspective on communicating goals, plans and implementation, thus creating a new tone for communication. In sustainability communication, the most important thing is not the result, but what you want to do, why it is considered important, how you intend to get there and who will carry out the journey.

If a goal needs to be postponed along the way or an implementation does not produce the desired result, the company’s sustainability communications take an honest perspective on the matter, transparently tell the situation and communicate the new goals or how the operations are going to be fine-tuned in the future.

Reformulating goals, updating the range of means or reformulating the core messages of responsibility may become topical along the way, and it will be approached with the gentleness required – the operating environment is changing at such a rapid pace that it is impossible to assume that things will remain the same for years or decades.

The ability to articulate responsibility and distill the essential is a core professional skill of effective communicators

There is much more to tell about sustainability these days, as  the frameworks of sustainability reporting, for example, are  becoming established and certain data must already be available from almost all companies. However, the streamlining of reporting and the complexity of issues put the company’s sustainability communications in a situation where the needle is searched for in a figurative haystack on a daily basis.

What is essential, what can be left out without the risk of greenwashing, and what is it that serves the stakeholders’ need to know about the company’s responsibility to support their own decision-making process?

The ability to articulate responsibility is now even more topical. As an area of expertise, the regulatory formulation of sustainability claims becomes one of the most important cornerstones of a company’s sustainability communication, and it is not entirely simple. In addition to materiality, comprehensiveness, life-cycle thinking and the environment, there are many angles to social, economic and administrative responsibility that sometimes also contradict each other.

To prevent communication from becoming a jungle of countless asterisks, you need to put time and resources into verbalising, formulating messages and clarifying the sustainability entity if you want to stand out from the masses of the market. “What makes us special in the field of sustainability?” is a question that is on many people’s minds right now. What is the tone in which we communicate our responsibility?

Transparency is at the heart of a company’s sustainability communication

Although sustainability communication must go hand in hand with the company’s strategy and other communications, it is still a separate field of communication that we are only learning to understand collectively.

Sustainability communication cannot be done in a vacuum, and even though communications have long been a close partner of business, corporate sustainability communications require a new kind of thinking from the entire organization and especially from its management. We must have the courage to open communication channels earlier than we are often used to, and learn to tolerate the momentary discomfort of failure or redesign. Instead of rhetoric, we must be encouraged to be open, transparent and concrete. When you dare to do that, the company’s sustainability communication is already much more effective than that of many others.

Sweco’s sustainability communications experts swim in the regulatory sea of sustainability communications like fish in water. We support companies, communities, projects and projects in communicating about responsibility, verbalising responsibility, planning and, of course, implementing corporate responsibility communications. To ensure content accuracy, our communicators have about 200 top professionals from Sweco’s sustainability consulting as their partners, so fact-checking is possible on any topic.

Please contact us if we can support you and your organisation on your sustainability communication journey.

Annika Stubbe, Senior Consultant, annika.stubbe@sweco.fi