可持续运营的目标设定 101

1. Assess material sustainability issues

The crux of an organization’s goals will rest on the materiality assessment that identifies and prioritizes the sustainability focus areas. This is a critical step to sustainability strategic planning as the commitments will drive important downstream activities and efforts, from meeting certain compliance requirements to investing in the right resources to collect, measure, and report on organizational progress. This requires interviewing stakeholders to learn how they prioritize various issues, and these insights will help guide not only strategy but also the sustainability story. Notably, sustainability goals will go far if they are clearly connected to the mission and purpose. 

Performing a materiality assessment

A significant initial task is to uncover, size up, and analyze the sustainability topics that could materially impact the business, or conversely, the issues that operations could materially impact.

Flex’s materiality assessment methodology:

1. Select and refine topics
2. Select and interview stakeholders
3. Synthesize and document

Many of our customers at Flex, for instance, have expressed interest a desire to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and ensure their supply chain partners have safe and ethical labor practices. In those cases, both climate and labor issues would be at the top of their materiality assessment.

As companies identify and prioritize the issues list, the ones that will rise to the top will be those that are most important to the business and most important to stakeholders. 

Identify and engage stakeholders both inside and outside of the organization who can constructively weigh the various issues and share insightful perspectives. Besides customers, investors, and community partners, we also engage suppliers, governments, regulatory agencies, and labor organizations. 

We have also found experts in academia and nonprofits to be helpful; for instance, the World Wildlife Fund has been a great partner in guiding us on how to engage and support certain communities where we operate. 

As for internal stakeholders, we consult a cross section of subject matter experts who advise on risks and budgets. Given our global operations, we ensure our stakeholders represent the interests of our key geographic markets.

Key steps taken during Flex’s materiality assessment:

• Assess sustainability topics from various frameworks 
• Identify topics with the greatest potential for impact and importance to business and stakeholders 
• Select internal and external stakeholders representing a wide range of functions, geographies, and sectors 
• Engage stakeholders to source input through in-depth interviews 
• Analyze responses from stakeholders to determine material priorities 
• Develop an approach to integrating material topics into our sustainability program 

As the pool of stakeholders will have varying priorities, the sustainability team will aim to connect these dots and align them to Flex’s mission along with the key business drivers. After analyzing the findings from our research, surveys, and interviews, we validate our assessment with the executive team. You can see Flex’s materiality matrix at the beginning of our latest sustainability reports.  We update our list of material issues annually in response to the evolving needs of our most valued stakeholders, and this is reflected in our 10-K and proxy reports. 

Sustainability reports issued by industry peers 

While much of research is inward looking, there’s much to consider outside the walls of an organization to help shape goals. Keeping a pulse on emerging trends and practices is key. Analyzing the sustainability reports of organizational peers will create an important benchmark to identify where the company lags, exceeds, or is at parity in its sustainability reporting efforts. This can inform goal-setting as areas for improvement are revealed, and shed light on where the organization is ahead so as to continue to build momentum. 

2. Identify cross-functional collaborators

On completing a materiality assessment, it’s critical to identify internal and external collaborators who will come together as partners on the sustainability journey, starting with the development of goals. 

Because corporate responsibility today has an extremely broad scope that ranges from fair labor practices to net zero emissions, sustainability goals rely on and affect many facets of the business. As a result, sustainability teams need partners across the organization to help set, execute, and measure sustainability goals. At Flex, these teams include facilities, human resources, operations, legal, business units, and finance. Given our global presence, we also engage managers who lead our sites across the world. 

Sustainability partners are not limited to internal collaboration

If possible, key customers and shareholders should be included in the materiality exercise. It will ensure a balanced perspective and may help uncover opportunities. Most notably, engaging suppliers can ensure the integrity of a supply network.

At Flex, we set expectations with our vendors through a supplier code of conduct and regularly evaluate our suppliers and our labor agencies for potential risks as well as sustainability performance. We also offer educational resources such as webinars and share best practices with our preferred suppliers to help them set environmental targets. 

Regardless of whether partners are internal or external, we continuously engage and empower them. This includes checking in on a regular cadence to offer support, ensure accountability, and proactively share research to help them think about their goals over the near, mid-, and long-term. Engaging the right partners who can drive progress and be accountable for their targets should lead to successful outcomes. 

Equally, fluency in integrating the efforts of collaborators and connecting the dots across different sustainability domains are also critical success factors. In short, program managers who empower their collaborators by positioning sustainability as a shared goal and facilitating progress rather than taking outright ownership of the goals will see productive returns on their efforts.

3. Develop and align targets

With your internal collaborators, develop targets that align with your organization’s mission and key business drivers. For a manufacturer like Flex, our goals will hew to sustainable manufacturing practices that, among others, minimize our environmental footprint, promote the well-being of our employees, and ensure that ethics and transparency remain a priority.

Checklist: connecting the dots in goal-setting:

Tie the sustainability agenda to the company’s purpose, mission, strategy, and day-to-day operations. 

Align to frameworks that are significant to the business and stakeholders for measuring performance. 

Think big, but also think incrementally about the progress that can be realistically achieved quarter-to-quarter and year-to-year. 

Sustainability is a journey, not a sprint. We take bold but purposeful steps that put our organization on the road to responsible growth. It’s essential to target aspirational goals that can inspire the organization to join the journey and make meaningful progress that can beget greater progress. While net zero or zero-waste can sound daunting, laying the groundwork to get there and achieving incremental results should embolden the organization to fully embrace ambitious targets.

At Flex, we launched Flex 20 by 2020 in 2015, committing to 20 sustainability targets in alignment with the 联合国可持续发展目标：. Every year since then, we have shared our progress on each of these goals. At launch, this was a big step for our sustainability team, but the decision was to challenge ourselves and learn from the experience. Out of our 20 goals, we met 16 and are proud of our efforts. We have since taken our learnings and investments to launch our 2030 strategy and commitments, reflecting our most ambitious goals yet. Among our targets, we commit to reducing absolute Scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions 50 percent by 2030¹ and achieving zero waste in at least half of our manufacturing sites by 2025.

4. Track and measure

Measuring and reporting progress helps evolve a sustainability journey. Moreover, sharing progress and milestones with collaborators and stakeholders can yield constructive feedback for continuous improvement. 

While missing a target is not uncommon for companies, it is critical to analyze where efforts fell short and apply these learnings to continuously improve. A successful approach prioritizes being as transparent as possible in communicating why the goal was not met. 

One key is to operationalize a sustainability strategy and create annual or multi-year plans with key performance indicators, milestones, targets, and goals. Communicating goals and progress to employees and beginning to share this information publicly helps set the expectation that sustainability reporting is becoming as mandatory as financial reporting. 

The best practices for collecting data are outlined in the next post, since after goal-setting, data collection represents the crucial next phase in laying the foundation for responsible growth and reporting. At every step of the way, Flex partners with our customers to learn how to operate more sustainably together. 

¹from a 2019 base year and target boundary includes biogenic emissions and removals from bioenergy feedstocks