With Workiva's Sustainability Reporting solutions, your organization can disclose its impact on — and the impact of — environmental, social, and governance (ESG) or sustainability topics to stakeholders, including investors, employees, and communities, with these features:
- Sustainability Explorer, to browse and explore content of multiple frameworks and standards together
- Sustainability Program, to identify values to include in sustainability reporting outputs and track their data collection
- Data Collection spreadsheet, to curate data based on framework topic and year
- Factbook spreadsheet, to define topics and metrics and prepare values based on data collected
Note: Only workspace members with the Sustainability reporting role can use Sustainability Explorer and Sustainability Program. To collect data and update disclosures for sustainability reporting, a member needs Editor or Owner permissions to the Data Collection and Factbook spreadsheets and their connected Wdata queries and tables.
Step 1. Choose disclosures to report
To help standardize sustainability reporting, several organizations provide guidelines — or frameworks — of topics and metrics to report on, which are curated together within Sustainability Explorer.
To identify which frameworks' topics and metrics to disclose:
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From Sustainability Explorer , search and browse various frameworks' disclosures together, and identify related topics across them.
Tip: As you determine applicable topics and metrics, bookmark them for quick reference, such as to help identify values to disclose as you compose your narrative.
Tip: To narrow the focus of the disclosures that appear in Sustainability Explorer, select which frameworks and industries to include from the Properties panel.
- From Sustainability Program , set up the material topics to disclose in your reporting, and add metrics to enable data collection of their values.
Step 2. Collect values to disclose
After you define the topics and metrics to report on, update the Data Collection spreadsheet with the corresponding values to disclose, and connect their values to metrics within Sustainability Program:
-
From Sustainability Program,
use the topics' metrics
to collect the values to disclose.
For each metric:
- Enter its value, or assign workspace members to prepare values through Workiva Tasks, the Data Collection spreadsheet, or another connected source file.
- For additional context about a value, add references to related framework items, custom tags your company tracks for values, and any additional notes.
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To update the Data Collection spreadsheet:
- Manually enter the data in the applicable sheets.
- Create an incoming connection to a sheet from a source query that includes the dataset, such as from a chain or uploaded comma-separated values (CSV) file.
For each value, select its framework topic and year. You can also enter additional details, such as a value's data provider, reviewer, status, or any tags your organization tracks.
-
To ensure your Factbook spreadsheet and its linked
outputs have the latest values, from the Connections
panel, select
Outgoing,
and click
Refresh
for the updated sheet's connection.
Step 3. Create reporting outputs
To ease sustainability reporting, the Factbook spreadsheet includes aggregations and formulas to calculate values for each topic or metric defined in the framework indices based on the collected data. You can link these calculated values to final reporting outputs, such as in:
- Sustainability reports
- CDP questionnaires
- Investor reports
- Framework indices
- Key performance indicators (KPIs)