The Curious Case of Skeleton ESG Teams
“And as long as companies continue to perceive ESG and sustainability as a cost, ESG professionals will continue to feel overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated.”
The Curious Case of Skeleton ESG Teams
I speak to many ESG and sustainability professionals, and if there is one theme that often emerges out of these of conversations, it would be the fact that their ESG department is severely understaffed. As a result, many ESG professionals feel exhausted, poorly supported, resource constrained, and increasingly disillusioned about what they do and why they do it.
One corporate ESG professional told me that his multi-billion dollar public company has a whole floor in a high-rise office building fully dedicated to finance and accounting, but only one shared desk for three ESG professionals, and yet, those three poor souls are expected to do as much work, if not more, than their finance colleagues.
The above is not an anomaly, but a reality of life for most of those who work in the ESG space. Tiny ESG teams are expected to: design, assess, and help implement deeply complex climate and sustainable transition plans. Collect, analyze, and report on an enormous amount of sustainability-related data (most of which sits outside of their control). Synthesize an endless amount of ESG news, developments, frameworks, and regulations. Publish extensive sustainability reports, spin out numerous ESG decks, fill countless sustainability surveys, and assist a multitude of departments with their ESG-related needs and requirements. And do all this, while continuing to train and up skill as the ESG/sustainability field grows and matures.
The intensity of the work and the cross-cutting nature of the responsibilities of ESG teams creates an odd impression that the ESG department is a vital organ, the beating heart of the enterprise, and yet in the same token, the peripheral nature of sustainability in most companies’ operations, creates the impression that the ESG department is a redundant organ, a nuisance machine, spinning its wheels for a purpose long forgotten.
More than 20 years ago, early in my business career. Someone more experienced than me told me if you want to know what a company cares about, see what’s the biggest department is, where do they employee the most people, and that will give you a sense of what the company cares about. The reverse is equally true. With the few exceptions, I found this observation to be largely true.
The reality is, and it saddens me to admit it, for most companies sustainability is still viewed as a cost center. Companies that truly understand how to leverage their ESG and sustainability departments to create value are still few and far in between.
And as long as companies continue to perceive ESG and sustainability as a cost, ESG professionals will continue to feel overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated.
In conclusion, next time you see an ESG job ad using the words: small, intimate, and/or tight-knit to describe their ESG team, run for the hills.
#esg #worklifeinbalance #sustainability #corporatelife #burnout