Level: Beginner to Intermediate
Prerequisite: None
Today’s high investor demand for environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data reflects a perceived correlation between a company’s current ESG performance and its future financial performance. Most large companies today (95 percent of the S&P 500) provide publicly available ESG data. Yet ESG data provides relatively little value (especially when compared with financial information) for the companies themselves, for investors, for governing bodies, or for the public at large.
ESG data has five problems that keep it from providing actionable value:
- It does not convey impact
- It does not convey priorities
- It is difficult to compare across companies or sectors
- It does not integrate with financial statements
- It is typically siloed from the bulk of a corporation’s analytics
Wellbeing analytics is a new approach to managing a company’s ESG performance that does not suffer from these problems. It provides a systematic framework for companies to assess their ESG risk and tailor their ESG data collection and analysis processes to support investments aimed at adapting the company’s business model to succeed in a rapidly changing business climate while leveraging its existing analytics infrastructure.
The approach you will learn works by:
- Leveraging whatever analytics platforms and tools a company already supports
- Combining company information with relevant external data to paint a more complete picture of a company’s real impacts on the environment and society, the financial counterparts of those real impacts (e.g., contingent liabilities or assets), and the company’s investment options
- Using dimensional templates that capture real and financial indicators representing company inputs, production functions, outputs, and non-market impacts
Wellbeing analytics can provide better ESG data quality for less time and money than is being spent on ESG today.
You Will Learn
- What is ESG/sustainability and why has it become so important
- How real ESG performance can impact revenues, costs, customer retention, employee retention, company valuation, and other measures of corporate performance
- How to assess your company’s ESG performance risks
- How to prioritize those risks and derive a forward-looking investment plan intended to adapt the company to succeed in a changing business climate
- How to talk to CFOs and other financial executives about ESG issues in financial terms
- Why ESG needs to include both real and financial data
- How real ESG data can be systematically converted into financial data
- The kinds of data that need to be collected and analyzed for wellbeing analytics
- New kinds of analyses required for wellbeing analytics
- The major ESG reporting standards
- How to leverage existing analytics infrastructure to provide a systematic framework for tracking, organizing, and analyzing ESG data and related activities
- How wellbeing analytics can be used to rationalize corporate processes and improve corporate financial performance
Geared To
- Department heads and analysts working in/for sustainability/CSR/ESG
- CDO, CTO, and other officers and executives with responsibility over ESG data collection, reporting, or supporting tools and platforms
- Data strategists
- BI, analytics, and data management professionals wanting to understand how they can work with their ESG colleagues to help their companies operate more sustainably and profitably into the future
- Employees with specific operational responsibilities that are coordinated either with the ESG Group or the executive role overseeing ESG activities
- Board members who want to impact corporate leadership over matters of sustainability by speaking in a more principled, data-driven way