To assess the company’s impact on employees, governance, suppliers, community and environment, we need an industry benchmark to compare against. We gathered industry best practices, examined existing frameworks and labels, and analyzed the impact strategies, actions and communications of more than 40 competitors. All insights were summarized in an easy-to-use and edit spreadsheet to ensure internal ownership of the information.

Before a company can increase its positive impact, it is important to know which initiatives are already in place and in which impact areas improvement is necessary. The challenge for a company with multiple branches and production locations across Europe was to gather all relevant information from employees and project managers. To get a complete overview, we interviewed 22 employees from 5 departments in 3 different countries and across 4 different product groups. All insights and a summary of the interview answers on each topic were gathered in a spreadsheet.

As a final step in the impact scan process, we created a clear and very graphic overview of the company’s positive and negative impact. In addition to the visual, the positive, negative and neutral actions of the company were summarized for each topic. This provides the company with a very clear and actionable roadmap to increase their positive impact, choose an impact focus and start communicating about their sustainability.