CASE STUDY
Elevating Accenture’s ESG reporting
Bringing our commitment to ESG transparency and accountability to life through 360° Value
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Value from every angle
At Accenture, we strive to deliver 360° value for our more than 9,000 clients in over 120 countries, helping them reach new levels of performance, reinvent their businesses, and harness ongoing waves of technology and innovation.
We define 360° value as delivering the financial business case and unique value a client may be seeking, and striving to partner with our clients to achieve greater progress on inclusion and diversity, reskill and upskill our client’s employees, help our clients achieve their sustainability goals, and create meaningful experiences, both with Accenture and for the customers and employees of our clients.
And so, we set ambitious sustainability goals—for climate action, net-zero emissions and other priorities—and continued to combat climate change while supporting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. What’s more, we implemented targeted actions for our goals to drive change across our business, as well as for our clients.
But we knew we needed to do more so we could meet the evolving needs of all our stakeholders and truly embed sustainability across our business. To create 360° value for all, we had to measure and share our progress across multiple dimensions and do so in a way that’s not only data-driven, transparent and clear, but also connected and integrated with our business strategy.
Reporting reimagined
We are driving a new era of performance measurement by leveraging technology and introducing new ways of collaborating. In doing so, we’re delivering the right ESG data to the right stakeholders while also increasing competitiveness in the marketplace.
Since its debut in December 2021, the Accenture 360° Value Reporting Experience—a holistic, integrated and interactive digital hub—has demonstrated the multiple ways we create, drive and measure value, both in serving our clients and operating our business. The Reporting Experience consolidates our global financial and environmental, social and governance (ESG) measures, as well as our goals, progress and performance for each in one place, and allows stakeholders to customize reporting so they can easily access the metrics that matter most to them.
The Reporting Experience involved extensive collaboration across our organization. Functional Accenture teams—including Finance, Investor Relations, Legal, Sustainability, Corporate Citizenship, Human Resources, Global IT, Corporate Services & Sustainability, Marketing + Communications and the business—worked together to build the Accenture 360° Value Reporting Experience. The Reporting Experience itself is innovative, in addition to the content and approach.
We transformed our approach to reporting by focusing on the information needs of all our stakeholders—our clients, people, shareholders, partners and communities. At the same time, we provided clear and transparent disclosure across multiple ESG frameworks, demonstrating how we create value for all our stakeholders.
Here’s how we did it:
We began with the fundamentals—securing clear direction from our Chair and CEO Julie Sweet and obtaining Accenture board and leadership support for our reporting strategy. While consistent and integrated communications have always been our focus, we leaned into our messaging to ensure stakeholders truly understood the benefit of 360° value—and how we deliver it.
We established a governance model and a steering committee to execute on our reporting strategy. Additionally, we defined key roles and responsibilities across the organization.
As a long-standing partner of the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), we built on our foundation of ESG reporting and furthered our commitment to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. In addition to our ongoing comprehensive 360° Value Report, we report against six ESG reporting frameworks: the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosure (TCFD), the World Economic Forum International Business Council (WEF IBC), the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards, the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC).
Recognizing that ESG and transparency go hand-in-hand, we doubled down on data assurance so that stakeholders have a clear view into our reporting. We leverage the rigor and discipline of our Controllership function to evaluate our governance over policies, systems, internal controls and assurance. In doing so, we’re raising the bar on reporting. What’s more, it allowed us to accelerate our data-gathering and reporting timelines so that our 360° Value reporting are more closely aligned with our financial reporting timeline. The result? A more holistic and transparent view into our operations for stakeholders.
Technology enables transformation. Just as importantly, it allows companies to facilitate reliable, real-time reporting. At Accenture, we leverage our centralized core systems, including single global instances of SAP, Workday, and Salesforce Net Zero Cloud to deliver visibility and accountability for our business and our clients. At the same time, sustainability performance measurement and reporting depends on accurate, real-time, and reliable data. This means having a data-led performance management capability which blends financial and non-financial goals, consolidates metrics in one place, and provides a foundation for decision-making and transparency with internal and external stakeholders. Accenture’s well-developed data-led performance management capability, coupled with the Workiva ESG platform, further enables us to gather data efficiently and helps to ensure that the data is captured and consumed systematically, accurately and in a repeatable way—ultimately creating efficiencies and reducing risk.
We are continuously exploring how technology, data and generative AI can further our own reinvention. As new regulation continues to develop across the globe, it is magnifying the imperative for all organizations to enhance workflows, integrate data collection from diverse sources, and leverage new solutions including AI to develop and produce content in an efficient and effective way. We are reimagining new experiences that will bring sustainability reporting to new levels.
Driving a new era of performance
Our goal was to reimagine the reporting experience for our stakeholders and provide a more comprehensive view of the unique value we bring to our clients. Today, we’ve harmonized our ESG and financial reporting, and can clearly show our measures, goals, progress and performance for each. And it can all be accessed from one place.
Our integrated reporting delivers transparency and accountability—the hallmarks, we believe, of good governance. As always, our objective is to measure our performance and report how well we are achieving our goal of creating 360° Value for all our stakeholders.
Leaders have a real opportunity to drive a new era of performance by making the best use of technology and new ways of collaborating to bring the right ESG data to stakeholders, while contributing to a company’s competitiveness in the marketplace.