How to Track Your Sustainability Impact Without Overwhelm

We know that all businesses, no matter their size, can contribute to reducing the impact we have on our planet and its people. And, key to reducing the impact you have is knowing how you are tracking in relation to the sustainability goals you have set. Without tracking, progress will be variable and often slower. Tracking gives impetus and brings accountability.

Three reasons to measure your sustainability initiatives

It helps you see progress – Tracking your data lets you see how you are stacking up against the goals you set and how much progress you have made since you started your sustainability journey. This can be a great motivator, especially if your staff are involved in the initiatives and can see how they are making a difference.

It shows where you can make more changes – Tracking your initiatives can also help you determine where tweaks are needed to make more progress, or it might show where you can make a similar impact in other areas. The data might also show that the initial target you set was unrealistic and needs to be revised. Remember, this isn’t a failure – it’s part of your authentic sustainability journey.

It helps you tell a better, more transparent story – More and more people are citing alignment with values as important when they are looking for organisations to work for, buy from, partner with or invest in. And making a positive impact on sustainability, whether it’s social, economic or environmental, is a big part of that. Tracking your initiatives and progress allows you to tell your story transparently with data to back it up. This builds trust with potential customers, employees and investors and helps you avoid issues like greenwashing.

Thankyou Payroll Emissions Profile

So now you know why you should be tracking your initiatives – how do you do that? And more importantly, how do you do it without it becoming overwhelming?

There are two main concerns when it comes to implementing and tracking sustainability initiatives…

Time – As you probably know from other parts of your business, collecting, inputting and analysing data takes time. And that’s something a lot of businesses, especially smaller ones, don’t have a lot of. Adding in another set of statistics to be looked at and reported on might feel a bit too hard.

Accuracy – Keeping records, especially manually, can leave you open to human error, which could impact the reporting of your results. Some initiatives are easy to measure. For example, you could see how much you are reducing paper waste, but reviewing how often you are ordering new paper or by tracking the weight of the weekly recycling. But other things, like carbon emissions, can be trickier and may result in inaccuracies.

About Thankyou Payroll and our Sustainability

How to Start Tracking Your Sustainability Journey Without the Overwhelm

If you are just starting out, start small and scale.

Are you are right at the beginning of your sustainability journey? Then don’t try to do everything all at once. Start with one or two key goals and determine the metrics you’ll need to measure. Here are some things you might start with:

• Electricity usage
• Water consumption
• Waste
• Carbon emissions within your immediate control
• Diversity within your team
• Charitable impact or volunteer time

Starting small enables you to collect data more easily in-house through recording data from invoices, bills or online accounts into spreadsheets or via a simple, free online tool.

Make sure your targets are clear – When you are setting goals, choose clear targets with measurable outcomes. For example, rather than just saying you want to reduce energy usage, set a target of reducing energy usage by 20% and ensure you have the reporting ability to measure that through your electricity provider. This makes it easier to interpret the data you have in conjunction with the targets you have set.

Integrate measuring and reporting into existing processes
- Rather than creating an entirely separate workflow, look to embed sustainability tracking into existing operational and reporting systems, such as HR, procurement, finance, or health and safety procedures. Upskill employees in these teams to incorporate the new data collection and reporting. This makes sustainability tracking a shared effort and spreads the workload rather than putting it all on one person.

If you are further down the track, don’t let things stagnate

If you are already a way along your journey, don’t lose momentum.

Get more detailed with your data collection 
- Using digital tools and software platforms or partnering with companies that specialise in sustainability can help you drill down into your data more accurately and increase your impact.

At Thankyou Payroll, for example, we partner with Ekos to help us offset our carbon emissions. Ekos helps to run all our numbers and offset our emissions by purchasing credits at French Pass in Marlborough. Partnering with Ekos helps us identify not only Scope 1 and 2 emissions, but also Scope 3 emissions – “emissions that are not produced by the company itself and are not the result of activities from assets owned or controlled by them, but by those that it’s indirectly responsible for up and down its value chain”. This is something we’d have found harder to do by ourselves, so working with a company that has more technical knowledge helps us make progress. Find out more about our sustainability commitment.

Tracking sustainability isn’t just about ticking boxes. By setting clear goals and using smart tools and strategies, you can turn aspirations into tangible positive impact.