ESG is built on the policies of the organization. From the code of conduct down into the range of policies that govern the environment, health and safety, inclusivity, diversity, privacy, labor standards (e.g., child labor, forced labor, working conditions), anti-bribery and corruption, transparency, security, and many more. These all establish the framework for what ESG is in the organization. It is through policies and policy enforcement/adherence that the organization’s integrity to ESG is measured against. Only through the foundation of established written codes of behavior and boundaries of conduct is an ESG program then assessed, measured, monitored, and reported upon. Simply put: you cannot have an ESG program without policies. Therefore, well-written policies and good policy management practices are an essential foundation to an ESG program in an organization.

To engage employees requires policy and training to be delivered through interactive experiences that provide the right context for the employee. This means integrating content and technology into a cohesive policy and training interface that connects everything together with one thought in mind — the employee experience. Organizations need to approach employee engagement to address a strong compliance and ethical culture with a strategy and architecture to manage the ecosystem of compliance, policies, and training in an integrated portal throughout the organization. Technologies like Ekko, which introduce integrated policy, ethics, and learning platforms using the most recent technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to do exactly that

The challenge is that organizations will often find that their policies are a mess and policy management even more of a mess. That different departments have different portals, templates, file shares, and more. Many organizations do not even know what policies they have. If you are going to start an ESG strategy and program in your organization, I suggest you start with doing a good inventory of your current policies, map them to your ESG risks and framework, clean them up, provide consistent management and monitoring of policies leveraging technology designed for policy management, and deliver a single portal of all the organizations policies to your employees, again through technology designed for policy engagement. You cannot do ESG without addressing your policies and the management of them. Your Content Goes Here