What is ESG?
Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) criteria are corporate governance goals which help Board of Directors, Company Leadership and Company Secretaries measure the ethical impact of organizational investments. The criteria represents conscious participation of a board towards running organizations responsibly to ensure preservation of the environment, benefit of the society and adherence to corporate governance.
As a part of ESG, data collected for specific metrics related to tangible and intangible assets are evaluated to grade the company with a score. The score can be considered as a type of corporate social score. It determines how thoroughly a board considers its social responsibilities at the time of making organizational decisions which generally happen during board meetings and committee meetings.
Environmental criteria considers how a board performs as a custodian of nature. This includes a company’s energy use, waste production, pollution, natural resource consumption and treatment of animals.
An example would be a board conducting board and committee meetings with paper agendas or email agendas. This leads to suboptimal use of resources. Apart from inefficiency, the suboptimal use of resources contributes to an environmental impact while most organizations are trying to minimize their carbon footprints.
Social criteria examines the relationships with employees, suppliers, customers, and the corresponding society. It comes down to the board’s decisions that impact the lives of the employees and investors.
An example would be a board manually handling all meetings processes such as agenda management, minutes preparation, voting and attendance handling which can be labor intensive. Alternatively, boards using the paperless meetings solution experience better efficiency and automation for employees and all other stakeholders.
Governance relates to the Board of Directors, Leadership and the Board’s policies on audits, internal controls, corporate standards and shareholder rights. The stakeholders wish for systematic processes and data for an accurate understanding of the Company’s progress.
An example would be a company relying on managing performance evaluation voting and reporting manually, where the chance of errors are high. With a paperless meetings solution, boards are able to completely digitize the performance evaluation activity and experience automatic scoring and results.
ESG compliance can influence the credibility of any responsible board. A complete solution which offers the best of technology as well as corporate governance is the need of the hour.
Dess can help achieve ESG goals
Dess Digital Meetings, the industry-leading paperless meeting solution leads to more efficient and effective board and committee meetings. It reduces the carbon footprint for responsible boards by eliminating archaic needs to print, photocopy multiple agenda boardbooks, store records, shred redundant documents among other meticulous activities.
The solution saves countless hours for Board of Directors and Company Secretaries which otherwise go into painstaking pre-meeting, during-meeting and post-meetings activities. Accommodating changes and last minute meeting updates becomes effortless for Company Secretaries and meeting administrators. In addition to agendas and minutes, the solution helps with all meeting documents including resolutions and voting, attendance and reports, corporate governance reports, among others.
With in-built video conferencing integration, Board of Directors and Management Teams can seamlessly and securely collaborate on-the-go, at any time and with 24/7 support. Dess is built to solve real-world challenges and maximize ease-of-use to support boards and leadership teams analyze better, move quicker, and accomplish more.
Dess Board Portal helps optimize corporate governance practices with holistic maintenance of meeting records, calendar of meeting events, preparation and dispatch of meeting notice among other activities. Also, with features like confidential voting, the Board of Directors can perform more professionally while maintaining privacy and achieve better decision-making.
Dess can increase compliance for ESG:
Environmental (Conservation of the natural world)
Saving resources used in paper or email based board meetings is revolutionary. Dess serves leading boards across the globe to help them achieve effective automation. The solution can help improve adherence scores for the following points.
- Reducing carbon emissions
- Avoiding deforestation
- Paper waste management
Social (Consideration of people & relationships)
Responsible boards believe that its people are the most valuable part of their organization. When the Board of Directors and Management Teams care for the wellbeing of stakeholders, the organization sees better growth. With the use of Dess, responsible boards achieve a high score in the following categories.
- Data protection and privacy
- Employee engagement
- Community relations
- Customer satisfaction
Governance (Standards for running a company)
Automating board meetings processes can lead to governance compliance. When all the data is disseminated and maintained through an appropriate system, it fundamentally becomes easier for the organization to achieve more accurate and seamless activities and a more professional culture.
- Transparency
- Illicit Executive compensation
- Whistleblower schemes
