The Victorian Chamber partnered with industry experts to discuss the significance of ESG in today’s business landscape at a special webinar event, ESG Simplified.

Tara Anderson, CEO of social enterprise procurement specialist Social Traders, delivered the keynote presentation exploring the definition and evolution of ESG.

The audience also heard from Jenny Odgers, General Manager Corporate Responsibility at Metro Trains Melbourne and Julia Tink, Co-Founder at St Remio Coffee, specific examples of how small and big business have integrated ESG.

Top tips for business

Ms Anderson emphasised that although “ESG is complex, it can be simplified for your context.”

“It’s a big, broad, chunky concept, but there are pieces within it that will be more relevant to you and… how you make it practical in your own context.”

Her top tips for what ESG leaders do include:

1. Make it more than ‘have to’ – Focus on growth rather than compliance.
2. Step into external shoes – This is about leadership understanding who their stakeholder groups are, what matters to them, and what the responsibility is to them.
3. Do what matters most – Focus on what’s material to your business. It’s not about doing everything. It’s not about copying what someone else is doing. It’s about figuring out what matters most to your stakeholder group, your business context, and building out from there.
4. Take it from the top – It works best when ESG is embedded from the top down, and that’s the board all the way down to the whole leadership team, CEO and executive team to understand this and set the tone or culture that makes ESG happen.
5. Make it everyone’s job – Centralising it in cross-functional teams, or a centralised team of embedded within leadership, to make sure that it is part of everything that the business does.
6. Bake it in – Embed purpose across all parts of the business when you have figured out your what you want to focus on to create ESG outcomes. Then it’s about looking at how you embed that in your brand, your products, your talent strategy – no ‘purpose silos’.
7. Reward it - There’s nothing like a target and incentive such as a bonus that’s connected to an ESG outcome.

Ms Anderson added that ESG initiatives shouldn’t be unattainable, complex or out of reach, removed from the core business or one-off events. With a starting point of doing no harm, business can move up to common practice (neutral impact) and then next-level impact to make the world better.

Business examples

Ms Odgers outlined a key ESG example for Metro Trains – gender equality.

“We know that women in transport is very important to all our stakeholders, including our own employees and prospective employees.

“We’ve actually just recently celebrated the recruitment of our 500th female train driver, something that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.

“It’s around knowing who your stakeholders are, finding out what’s important to them, sharing what’s important to you and your business.”

For Ms Tink, her business is about turning coffee from a commodity to community, addressing the “big disconnect between where coffee comes from and how it’s consumed”.

“We need to understand the process. We also need to respect the process. And in doing that, it’s about rising coffee growers out of poverty.

“We’re about not only changing that conversation away from coffee as a commodity to community, but we’re about giving a voice and making consumers aware that their choices have a direct impact on the lives of others, and they can either unknowingly perpetuate the cycle of poverty or we can learn about coffee and we can be the solution and we can break it.”

The full webinar discusses the broader definitions of ESG and what drives it, why it is relevant and important in today’s, examples of ESG pioneering businesses and social enterprises, and how businesses can start their journey. You can watch it on the ESG Simplified page.

How the Victorian Chamber can help

To find out more information please visit the Victorian Chamber’s ESG Hub. It contains key information from a recent Chamber event with renowned global speaker and ESG expert Bea Boccalandro, and other features including:

• A free ESG fit test to learn more about how ESG applies to you and how it can be integrated into your business strategy.
• Our ESG Fundamentals Self Paced Learning course, which is an introduction to ESG, demystifying the acronym and providing you the tools and know-how to implement ESG practices into your workplace.
• Expressions of interest for the ESG Assessment Program, which aims to partner with businesses in assessing their Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) performance and developing a material list of actions relevant to their specific operations.
• Expressions of interest for Learning Labs, which aims to provide businesses with easy-to-understand insights on important ESG issues and practical steps for improvement to apply to your business.