The eight tasks of a sustainability officer, and a self-check for SMEs

Suppose a large customer sends a three-page ESG questionnaire, the bank asks about your environmental policy, and nobody in the company knows whose job it is. In 2021 many companies answered by hiring a chief sustainability officer: more were appointed that year than in the previous five years combined (Farri et al., 2023). Your company has no CSO, but the eight things that role has to cover still exist.

How new and how vague is the CSO role?

According to the summary of Farri, Cervini and Rosani (2023), the number of companies appointing a CSO has grown significantly in recent years, but because the role is new, its actual responsibilities and tasks are still vague. They also write that executives and boards must ensure the CSO's role is balanced among all three elements of ESG (Farri et al., 2023). The library concept of the chief sustainability officer records the same idea: a new executive role, with duties and reporting lines often unclear.

For the owner of a small business the vagueness arrives sooner. There is no title to ask, so the question lands on the owner's desk or the chief accountant's.

What are the eight tasks?

According to the library framework (credited to Farri, Cervini and Rosani, 2023), the eight tasks sit in four phases:

The right-hand column below is my interpretation for a small company, not the source's words.

On stakeholders, the post on shareholders or stakeholders explains why any group affected deserves a hearing before a decision is final.

How do you score the tasks to find gaps?

The library framework rates the effort for each task from 1 to 7: low 1 to 2, medium 3 to 5, high 6 to 7. The aim is to find gaps, then fix them phase by phase rather than all at once. That is the content of the library framework, which I could not check against the original article by Farri and colleagues. I have not read the full article, so I do not know what else the authors advise on scoring.

My use for an SME: give each task two columns. Column one is the current level of effort. Column two is the level needed, judged by real pressure such as a customer's demand, the law or a loan. The difference between the two is the gap. Have two people score separately, because self-scoring tends to flatter the work already done.

A hypothetical example: a food-packaging company with 45 staff

This company does not exist. I made up the figures for illustration.

The largest gap is task 8, but I would not start there. A large customer is asking for data, so the nearest pressure is task 2, in the compliance and reporting phase. The first phase comes first because the later ones rely on its data. Six months on, the company rescores and moves to relations and capability (4 and 5), then to transformation. That is my reading: order by pressure, not by the gap column, and the library framework says only to fix by phase.

Be careful when reporting runs ahead of doing. If task 2 reaches 4 while task 8 stays at 1, the company has handsome numbers and an unchanged reality. The library concept of greenwashing names that gap. This caution is my own.

Why not add the eight scores into one number?

The temptation is real: add up the "now" column, get 18 out of 56, and paste it into a report. Do not. Norman and MacDonald (2004) wrote about the triple bottom line. I think their argument also applies to any sum of unlike indicators; that is my inference, not theirs. They sum it up in a slogan: what is sound about the 3BL idea is not new, and what is new is not sound. The new part is the "Aggregation Claim", the claim that a net "social profit" can be calculated from indicators (Norman and MacDonald, 2004).

They give two reasons. One, most of the figures in their example are percentages, and you cannot add or subtract percentages attached to different quantities. Two, in the social sphere there is no common "currency" (in a monetary or non-monetary sense) in which to express all the good and bad a firm produces (Norman and MacDonald, 2004). The same holds for the eight tasks, and this is my inference: effort spent on compliance does not offset effort spent on culture. A score of 18 out of 56 hides the gaps you need to see. The post on doing well by doing good uses the same argument to read a claim about ESG.

John Elkington, who says he coined the term, called for a "recall" of it himself in 2018. He argued that 3BL had been reduced to an accounting tool, a way of balancing trade-offs rather than doing things differently (Elkington, 2018). For this post, 3BL is only a prompt for what to count, not a scoring formula.

What are the limits of this approach?

One, the framework speaks only of effort; in my remark, that means it does not measure results. A company scoring 6 on compliance may still be in breach if it works on the wrong things. Two, there is no evidence that firms using this self-check become more sustainable, and I have no source that measures it. Three, the SME description of each task is mine, so owners should adjust it to their industry.

Going deeper: what I read

The article by Farri, Cervini and Rosani (2023) sits behind the HBR paywall. I read the summary and the opening paragraph, and saw that the authors say they present eight tasks and a visual framework so each gets the level of effort it needs (Farri et al., 2023). I did not read the rest, including how they define each task and the scale, so the definitions in this post come from the library framework.

For Norman and MacDonald (2004), I read the authors' pre-publication manuscript, which has no reliable page numbers, so I only paraphrase. For Elkington (2018) I read only the public summary, and I did not read his original book, so I do not discuss his original intent.