The enhancement of your sustainability performance is the focus of our services

The Sustainability Code Handprint®  –  an integrated reporting and management system

Nowadays, companies concentrate more and more on reporting on their sustainability for public relation and reputational reasons. They often neglect to continually improve their actual sustainability performance. Subsequently, the companies quickly risk being accused of ‘greenwashing’: pursuing a purely marketing orientated sustainability policy. This can lead to a rapid loss of image, to frustrated customers, who turn their back on the company or its products, and to a decrease in the enterprise’s value.

There is a trend to overemphasize reporting and to neglect initiatives to improve sustainability performances. This trend is augmented by companies’ preferences for ‘integrated reporting’. While it is basically a good approach to represent sustainability in an overall view of the company’s development, this often makes the sustainability report dwindle down to a diluted minor part of the company’s business report, sometimes solely due to lack of space.  

In my consulting approach, change management and the appropriate reporting framework are functionally correlated. Sustainability is based on trust and credibility, which greenwashing corrupts.

The Sustainability Code Handprint® connects a management system, which pragmatically, participatory and continuously improves a company’s sustainability profile, to the clear and manageable reporting system of the Sustainability Code (“Deutscher Nachhaltigkeitskodex, DNK”).

With the Sustainability Code Handprint®, small and medium sized foreign companies, who take part in the supply chain of German/European enterprises, are also able to gradually develop their own sustainability strategies and sustainability management. With the implementation of the Sustainability Code Handprint®, these enterprises can develop quality standards which are comparable with certified qualifications and they can improve their Position in the market as well as their competitive edge. Sustainability Code Handprint® qualified companies grant a comparative advantage in their supply chains to enterprises in Germany/Europe. German/European enterprises thus improve the sustainability performance of their services or products, without active involvement: a typical win-win situation.

Last but not least: the „Sustainability Code Fact Sheet“ shows the outcome of the Sustainability Code Hndprint®  process on a poster (one-pager) and gives the employees as well as the stakeholder a one-glance-overview of the status quo of the sustainability performance and of the objectives of the improvement activities.