Greenwood Social Sustainability
Modern businesses find themselves operating in heterogenous social landscapes, working under a variety of different legal frameworks and engaging diverse workforces. With increasing scrutiny of social sustainability by regulators, investors and communities, rapid shifts in expectations have led to amplified risks to business continuity and development. In this ever-changing environment, there is no single, accessible resource available to provide guidance on how to manage social risks or understand what stakeholders expect.
Greenwood Social Sustainability offers bespoke solutions to these problems. Dr. Greenwood has a proven method for assessing risk and implementing systems that can turn social context into advantage and improve the capability of the entire organisation.
To combat risks associated with an enhanced regulatory environment and increasing scrutiny by investors and communities, businesses need to ensure they have: (1) Clearly defined social and community policies that align with their identified risk appetite; (2) A system of auditing and assurance to oversee the implementation of community and social policies; (3) A developed set of metrics and process for capturing successes, risks and learnings to drive continuous improvement; (4) Transparent reporting of these systems. Greenwood Social Sustainability offers a variety of services to support these efforts, build internal capability and empower your business to thrive.
Our auditing and assurance services analyse current controls and internal tools against regulatory requirements, company goals and industry best practice in order to identify deficiencies, highlight risks and provide solutions.
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Our assurance processes help identify whether deficiencies in your systems are caused by gaps in policies and processes, or non-compliance driven by governance systems that are too burdensome or not fit-for-purpose, low internal capability, or poor workplace culture.
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Effective stakeholder engagement is necessary to build community trust, maintain a social licence to operate and ensure clean project delivery. Genuine partnership with impacted communities shares risk and supports decision-making.
Controversial projects and historically difficult relationships require special attention and often third party facilitation to build trust and mediate conflict.
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Greenwood Social Sustainability can facilitate mediation workshops, relationship health checks, comprehensively map stakeholders and develop forward stakeholder engagement plans.
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Social sustainability is about identifying and managing business impacts, both positive and negative, on people. The quality of a company’s relationships and engagement with its stakeholders is reliant on good policy, clear processes and robust implementation. Reliance on relationships between individual employees and stakeholders creates a risk of long-term failure to maintain those relationships.
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Greenwood Social Sustainability offers strategic direction that aligns with company aspirations through the provision of comprehensive policy development and review and easy-to-follow implementation plans.
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The momentum for social sustainability is ever-increasing, making it difficult for employees to undertake their work and keep abreast of changing standards, emerging trends and geopolitical influences.
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Greenwood Social Sustainability uses twenty years of research and experience to provide educational workshops, online training modules and project guidance to develop the mindsets, behaviours and skills required to keep pace with social sustainability trends. We can also support Executive and Board members to better make sense of material risks and economic impacts. This includes the development of company risk appetite, budgeting expectations and the establishment of company social sustainability values and investor engagement strategies.
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Developing a set of social sustainability indicators and targets is critical to the enhancement of your brand and reputation. How to measure against these is complicated by the complex, context-driven and qualitative nature of social performance data. We can support you to implement internal tracking systems that identify material risks, improve operational efficacy and enable easier external reporting.
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Greenwood Social Sustainability also supports a variety of mandatory and ‘extended external reporting’ outputs - such as Modern Slavery Statements and Annual and Sustainability Reports - that provide transparent, high-quality, non-financial information to external stakeholders.
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Social investment strategies are a means of ensuring that your investments are positively impacting the communities in which you operate and creating maximum value for all stakeholders. A defined social investment strategy is more than just brand recognition, it enables businesses to maximise returns, improve brand reputation and foster constructive social change that improves peoples lives.
Greenwood Social Sustainability can create bespoke social investment strategies that align with company values, support reputable causes to achieve evidence-based outcomes, proactively engage your workforce and create better pathways for your future workforce.
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