When you have decided you want to improve your score, an obvious first step is to decide what you want to upgrade about your sustainability management system.
The impact a certain type of improvement will have on your score depends on your company’s industry, size, and location. Your EcoVadis Scorecard and Corrective Action Plan are great sources of inspiration for which improvements to prioritise. The Corrective Action Plan specifies whether an improvement/corrective action has high, medium, or low priority.
It often is not feasible to act on all improvements in one year. Therefore, it can be beneficial to decide which improvements can be made short-term (ahead of your next assessment), medium-term (to be completed the following year), and long-term (to be completed over the course of the following two+ years).
Some of the improvements that are relevant for most companies to include:
Mannaz can help your company to decide on which strategic improvement areas to focus on by facilitating a decision process that combines your strategic focus and double materiality assessment (if you have one) with your EcoVadis Scorecard and Corrective Action Plan. This process is valuable because it helps you make sure your improvement priorities are anchored in your company’s reality and strategy.
As you might have learned from your first assessment, sustainability touches many parts of the business. From HR and procurement to finance and operations to legal and products. That means broad involvement and collaboration is key to first and foremost gather the necessary data to fill in your EcoVadis questionnaire. Collaboration becomes even more important when you want to improve. You go from relying on others to retrieve data to now relying on others to make an extra effort to change existing processes or create new processes.
To activate this collaboration, the EcoVadis assessment lead/responsible begins by identifying who to involve. Once this is in place, the lead needs to take stock of these contributors’ knowledge and motivation levels.
Our experience tells us that improvement projects often fail because the contributors do not understand the project/what an EcoVadis assessment entails or because they do not realise the importance of the project and therefore do not prioritise it. An EcoVadis assessment lead can tackle this by motivating and upskilling their colleagues. Helping the contributors understand what an EcoVadis assessment is, why their contribution matters, and why an improved EcoVadis score will positively impact the company. Sustainability and EcoVadis are full of abbreviations and technical language, so it is important to help contributors understand what these terms mean in their context.
This upskilling and motivation can empower internal stakeholders to contribute more effectively and spot opportunities for further improvements. Mannaz can help with internal upskilling workshops and alignment workshops that get improvement projects off to a good start.
Supporting documents are your way to prove the validity of your responses in the questionnaire. It is therefore crucial for your result that your supporting documents are relevant, credible and up to date. Answers can be rejected on the basis of the supporting documents not living up to requirements. Upgrading or replacing the rejected documents from your previous assessment is an important step in your improvement process.
Mannaz can help you understand how to make sure your supporting documents are valid.
As an example, we have experienced that an area many companies struggle with is documenting the actions they are taking to train their employees. It is key to have a well-established structure for documenting these trainings because they are relevant actions across all material topics (for example awareness training to prevent corruption and training on waste management). If you do not have a structure, your score can be negatively impacted across all four themes. We can offer a solution with a digital platform that hosts your e-learning modules and tracks completion. This allows you to document the content of the training and to document the amount of people who have completed the training (including the percentage of the target group).
Lastly, make sure you are continually keeping track of your competitors and their sustainability efforts. Especially those competitors that are receiving similar or higher EcoVadis scores. Their improvements can be a source of inspiration for which areas you might also want to focus on improving and ideas for how you can do it.
EcoVadis medal eligibility is dynamic, so you need to stay aware of how and how much others are improving to assess whether you are leading, keeping up or falling behind.
Is your organisation preparing for an EcoVadis assessment or reassessment?
As an Accredited EcoVadis Core Consulting Partner, Mannaz can support your organisation in successfully navigating the EcoVadis process.
Reach out to Berit or Anne to get in contact with our team of accredited EcoVadis consultants.
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