Worldly’s Environmental & Social Assessment Toolkit
A roadmap to achieving your annual assessment goals
Completing your supply chain’s annual environmental and social assessment can be challenging.
It can be difficult to navigate deadlines and communicate with all your suppliers efficiently. This toolkit will guide you through five ways Worldly customers address data collection challenges head-on and achieve high assessment completion rates.
Keep reading to learn more or jump straight to the resources to get started now.
Begin with the end in mind
Make a roadmap and a game plan targeted to your suppliers.
Assessments can expose hidden risks in your supply chain, help you meet regulatory requirements, reveal year-over-year progress, and shine a spotlight on areas for improvement. Before engaging suppliers:
- Discuss why you need the data and how you plan to use it
- Set goals by supplier tier, region, or type, ideally in collaboration with your suppliers
- Use benchmarking to ensure your goals are realistic and equitable.
"You can't give the same target to everyone. If you take two manufacturers, one in China, one in Bangladesh, giving them the same target isn't equitable because there are specific issues in these different countries – for example, one whose power grid is set up for renewable energy generation systems and net metering, and one that’s not. This impacts what they can truly change."
Customize communication
Communicate early, often, and in a variety of ways.
Data from Worldly’s platform shows a strong relationship between the frequency, type, and content of emails brands send to suppliers and supplier completion rates.
Be clear about your goals. Then communicate why, how, and when you want your upstream partners to complete their assessments.
Brands, retailers, and manufacturers have the most successful outcomes when they:
- Begin their communication six months ahead of their assessment completion deadline
- Communicate both directly with suppliers and through the Worldly Collaboration Suite
- Use facilities’ native language
Follow supplier engagement best practices
Engaging your upstream supply chain partners is vital to gathering sustainability data.
The new Worldly Collaboration Suite provides:
- More powerful tools and capabilities to drive greater supplier participation and unlock critical data visibility
- Support for increased supply chain collaboration and data completeness
- Education and enablement for brands, retailers, and suppliers on everything from getting started to the most advanced features
Train your stakeholders
The most successful brands embed sustainability throughout their entire business.
Educate and train your internal stakeholders as well as your business partners and vendors on the importance of aligning with your sustainability strategy.
Help your facility users become recognized Worldly Platform Experts
The Worldly Platform Experts Program is an excellent way for Higg FEM and Higg FSLM users at the facility-level to become Worldly super-users. This self-paced online curriculum will help those completing annual assessments do so more quickly, easily, and accurately.
Customer spotlight
For clothing, beauty, and home goods retailer Marks & Spencer, achieving net-zero emissions is an organization-wide goal. The sustainability team engages its cross-functional stakeholders to gain wider interest in environmental impact projects. It leads quarterly webinars and works very closely with colleagues across the production, technology, raw materials, and sourcing teams.
Marks & Spencer hosts an annual in-person meeting focused on sustainability where teams across the organization’s various sectors including food and logistics share updates on key projects. These meetings spark ideas for other teams about how to better engage with suppliers in their own sectors.
For more guidance and examples of how top-performing Worldly customers succeed, download The Responsible Brand’s Guide to Maximizing Supplier Engagement.
Inspire excellence
Elevate top performers among their peers
Publicly recognized facilities show exceptional results in Higg FEM or Higg FSLM completion, data quality, and score improvements over time. You can inspire other facilities to do the same.
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