With Workiva's ESG solutions , your organization can disclose its impact on—and the impact of—environmental, social, and governance (ESG) topics to stakeholders, including investors, employees, and communities. By default, Workiva's ESG solutions include:
- ESG Explorer, to browse and explore content of multiple ESG frameworks and standards together
- ESG Program, to identify values to include in ESG reporting outputs and track their data collection
- An ESG Data Collection spreadsheet, to curate ESG data based on framework topic and year
- An ESG Factbook spreadsheet, to define applicable topics and metrics and calculate values based on collected data
Note: Only workspace members with the ESG role can use ESG Explorer and ESG Program. To collect data and update disclosures for ESG reporting, a member needs Editor or Owner permissions to the ESG Data Collection and ESG Factbook spreadsheets, and their connected Wdata tables.
Step 1. Choose disclosures to report
To help standardize ESG reporting, several organizations provide guidelines—or frameworks—of topics and metrics to report on. ESG Explorer contains the topics and metrics from:
- Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)
- Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB)
- Task Force for Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD)
- United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDG)
To identify which of the primary frameworks' topics and metrics to disclose:
- From ESG Explorer , search and browse the topics and metrics of GRI, SASB, TCFD, and UNSDG all together, and identify related topics across frameworks.
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 ESG Explorer, select which frameworks and industries to include from the ESG Admin panel.
- From your ESG Program, set up the material topics to disclose in your ESG reporting.
- For each topic, add metrics to enable data collection of its values.
Tip: To help automate data collection, the Program automatically creates a process for each topic. When you add a topic's metrics, you can assign workspace members tasks to input and approve their values.
Step 2. Collect values to disclose
After you define the topics and metrics to report on, update the ESG Data Collection spreadsheet with the corresponding values to disclose, and connect their values to the ESG Program's metrics:
- From the ESG 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 ESG 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 ESG values, and any additional notes.
- To update the ESG 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 ESG 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 ESG reporting, the ESG 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)