Workiva Support Center

To help ease the adoption of a new framework, standard, or questionnaire for Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) or sustainability reporting, you can create a Readiness Assessment from Sustainability Explorer.

From a Readiness Assessment, you can:

• Review the new content — disclosure-by-disclosure — and narrow its scope to only the disclosures that matter to your company, such as based on a materiality assessment.
• Determine whether to report each disclosure — even if only internally or in a future reporting year — and document your decisions.
• Assess the data available in Sustainability Program or elsewhere to help identify gaps.
• Create tasks and Program metrics to help close gaps and enable data collection for disclosures.

Step 1. Create an assessment

Note: Currently, Readiness Assessments only support the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). To assess this content, first include ESRS in Sustainability Explorer from the Properties panel.

To help determine how prepared you are to report using new content:

1. From Sustainability Explorer, click Create assessment in Readiness assessments.
   
2. To specify who can collaborate on the assessment, click Permissions key, and select the workspace members to act as its Owners, Editors, and Viewers.
   
3. Select the Program and year with potential data and metric assignments relevant to the content.

   Tip: The assessment uses Program year to help identify metrics connected to relevant Related Explorer content, and workspace members who may understand the available data, based on their value assignments.

4. Enter a name for the assessment, and click Next.

Tip: After you create an assessment, you can return to it in Sustainability Explorer at any time, such as to work on it in intervals or to adjust earlier decisions.

Step 2. Select the content to assess

From Specify coverage, select the framework's standards or disclosures to include in the assessment, and click Next.  

To help determine which content to assess:

• Review the full content of each standard from the Preview preview panel.

  Tip: From the Preview panel, you can click Open in Explorer to review the content in Sustainability Explorer instead.

• Perform a materiality assessment with stakeholders.

Step 3. Decide which disclosures to report

Based on the content you choose to include, assess whether to report each disclosure from Make decisions.

Tip:  Depending on the number of disclosures included, reporting decisions may be iterative. You can return to a Readiness Assessment to update disclosures as you finalize their reporting decisions.

1. In Section, select the disclosures to assess.
2. To review the full content of a disclosure and its requirements, click Preview disclosure preview.
   
3. In Decision, select whether to report the disclosure.
   
4. If you choose to report the disclosure, even if only internally or in a future report, assess its available data from the Disclosure details settings panel.

   Tip: From the Disclosure details panel, you can apply custom assessment tags — set up by your Workspace Owner — to help categorize content or decisions based on data visibility, strategic gaps, or other contexts.

5. From the Decision documentation assignment panel, document the reasoning behind the reporting decision — especially if you decide to omir a disclosure, or report it only internally or in a future report.
   

Tip: To learn more, view Manage reporting decisions in Readiness Assessment.

After you decide whether to report each disclosure and assess the available data, click Next.

Step 4. Review your assessment

From Review assessment, you can view how prepared your data collection is to report the framework's disclosures. You can also review decisions about whether to report each disclosure, and any gaps based on the availability and confidence level of data.

Note: To adjust a decision about a disclosure, select Edit disclosure from its menu, and edit its selections from 3. Connect metrics.

Step 5. Create and complete an action plan

To help resolve gaps in data, click Create action plan to set up tasks or Program metrics to help resolve gaps and prepare to report disclosure.

From Create metrics:

• Add and manage tasks for yourself — like a To-Do list — or other workspace members.
• Create Program metrics for each overall disclosure or based on its subsections.

To learn more, view Manage action plan for Readiness Assessment.