We are happy to tell that our Falcony Family is getting a new member in the form of Falcony ESG: an involvement-first ESG Management solution. It helps organisations all over the world simplify their ESG reporting and comply with requirements of CSRD and ESRS.
This is the first blog post from our recent launch event held on the 5th of September 2024. More blog posts about other updates will follow soon.
ESG compliance means loads of data collection
We teased last April that we are looking into the ESG Topic and the requirements EU sets for companies through CSRD and ESRS, that stand for Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and European Sustainability Reporting Standards.
Although these standards and directives always relate more to compliance, it’s not just reaching that compliance, it’s how that can be done and how it transforms the company. If you don't yet guess, what we are talking about, it's involvement.
It’s what employees expect today. Everything has to work anywhere and anytime with just a few clicks. And this shift is of course impacting ESG compliance too.
A lot of the ESG compliance is about collecting certain data points from different systems, from different people and from different places. This task is nearly impossible with the typical ways like emails, calls and ERP's. We are not saying it cannot be done though. We're just recognising that the employees know for sure there are better, more involving ways to do it.
And that’s the key. Our new product, Falcony ESG, is where high involvement meets the enterprise grade requirements of ESG reporting systems. Let's dive in and show what we've got for you to match compliance with involvement.
Double-Materiality Analysis and Stakeholder Surveys
Double-materiality Analysis is the management level work that the standard requires to do. With the audit template that we have created in Falcony, you can assess the impacts, risks and opportunities, while Falcony will take care of the materiality calculations automatically.
We have also added stakeholder surveys that companies can use to involve their stakeholders for materiality assessment work. What they can then do is compare stakeholders’ view on the material topics versus their own view.
But what if you already have a double-materiality analysis and or stakeholder surveys done? The thing is that it needs to be updated to a bare minimum annually. Thus we can help to migrate the existing double-materiality assessment and stakeholder surveys into Falcony making the updating work easier and to help with the reporting and analytics of them.
Speaking of reporting, we’ve of course built a ready-made dashboard that helps to visualize the double-materiality assessment in the most popular BI software in the market, Microsoft Power BI. What you can do with this is compare different years to each other and drill-down to sub-sub-topic level.
ESRS Disclosures
The European Sustainability Reporting Standards consist of more than a thousand data points, disclosures and application requirements. To make the annual documentation process easier, we’ve split the standards into sub-topic specific checklists.
This might sound an overwhelming amount of work, but we can help a lot with Falcony scheduling functionality. What this means in practice is that you can schedule and assign different checklists to relevant people who are responsible for each topic. Falcony automatically sends reminders and helps to give an overview of where each disclosure is going.
After the documentation is done, you can get all the disclosures and documentation in a machine-readable format both in our analytics database and also in table format with excel export functionality.
What's more, there's of course another dashboard view for this module too. Since this whole disclosure work can be seen as a big project, we’ve made it easy to track and report on the progress of the required disclosures in an easy-to-use Power BI Dashboard.
Carbon accounting and Emission reporting
When it comes ESG, emissions and carbon footprint is what is often thought of when we talk about environmental management. But there’s of course much more than that. Falcony-wise we turn to observation templates instead of audit checklists.
We have emission calculators for all the common scope 1 and scope 2 emissions, several scope 3 calculators and ready-made templates to include scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions on free-based forms if you happen to make the calculations elsewhere outside of Falcony. This basically means that all emissions can be put through Falcony regardless of the source, scope, type or category.
What’s more, it’s completely audit-ready for external auditors as all the changes, all the numbers and all the emission factors are transparently shown in the logs. For external auditors, you can simply share access rights to view the data instead of sending multiple back and forth emails with attachments.
We have collected the most up to date emission factors mainly from GHG Protocol, but there are other sources as well, such as ecoinvent, exiobase, US Environmental Protection Agency to name a few. For each emission, we actually show the year and source of the emission factor so that anyone can easily double-check them. There’s always a possibility to override the pre-set emission factors with your own. In those cases Falcony asks you to give a free description of your own emission factor source.
Lots of companies, nowadays even small and medium based enterprises talk about net zero goal of emissions. To help with that we’ve created separate templates for carbon credits, emission offsets and even for Investments/projects that reduce GHG emissions in the future.
As you probably guess, this solution also includes a dashboard in Power BI. For emission data we have a separate KPI view for the management team that includes targets and even a tracker for the aforementioned net zero goal (that you can customize). There’s also another view that includes visual charts about the different sources, scopes of emissions along with emission intensity and net emissions.
Other ESG Metrics
When it comes to ESG metrics you've chosen, we have created templates for majority of the standards. All of them can be used to input the numbers into Falcony either manually, via csv files with the help of our customer success team or through our API. For example, you might want to have workforce data such as employee count, diversity or work hours from the HR-system. Water, energy and electricity consumption from another system can be done as well. With our API this can be fully automated.
Falcony ESG connects with rest of the Falcony Suite
If you already have some other Falcony product in use, there are lots of requirements in the standards that our solutions can help with.
Just to name a few, Falcony Risks already include ready-made risk assessment templates for climate risks, social risks, governance risks and ethical risks. With Falcony ideas, you can involve your extended organization for esg ideas, initiatives and for example energy saving suggestions. Falcony Audit has had for a long time templates for Sustainability, Environmental and code-of-conduct audits. And last but not least, Falcony Whistleblowing can easily be expanded to include other channels such Channels for concerns, grievance and complaint channels and discrimination reporting.
Customizable ESG Pages linked to your website
Let’s consider a point in time when you agree that you've truly done a good job with your ESG project. It would be a waste if you couldn't showcase your work somewhere in an easily digestible format.
To help here, we’ve created a good-looking, branded, mobile-responsive view that you can customize to include all the relevant ESG documents, dashboards, certificates, ESG reports and much more in one place. This view can be linked to your website but instead of having to wait for website updates, you are in control of all the changes here.
Conclusion
ESG is a bit topic requiring lots of work. With Falcony you can take charge of that work. If you are interested to learn more, hear what other stuff we have on the plans to include in our ESG product or discuss about the pricing, we are more than happy to book a meeting with you.
Want to see Falcony ESG in action? Simply reach out to us or start your FREE 30 day trial:
We are building the world's first operational involvement platform. Our mission is to make the process of finding, sharing, fixing and learning from issues and observations as easy as thinking about them and as rewarding as being remembered for them.
By doing this, we are making work more meaningful for all parties involved.
More information at falcony.io.
