What I learned by becoming a GRI Certified Sustainability Professional
A few years ago, I had a bit of an identity crisis. I'd been translating many of the same documents for the same clients for a decade. Lovely clients, lovely documents. But still. I was beginning to get ready for something new.
Luckily, a short time later, a colleague referred me to an agency looking for someone to translate a sustainability report for a German packaging recycling organisation. It was right up my street terminology-wise. And after a first read of the entire report, I realised that my writing skills were going to be put to the test too: it was full of passive sentences, abstract concepts and Germany-specific references (who knows offhand how many recycled bottles you would need to put in a line to stretch from Hamburg to Munich?).
I loved it. I delved into reports published by similar organisations in the UK and found lots of evidence to support my decision to write the chairman's message in the first-person plural. I chopped up long sentences into shorter ones. And I switched abstract headings like "das Wir-Gefühl" (literally: 'the We Feeling') into cultural idioms like "Smells Like Team Spirit". It was a lot of fun.
The agency has since hired me to translate a few other CSR reports, integrated environmental reports and ESG reports - and I've picked up other clients along the way. These publications had lots of different titles but one central concept: reporting on the triple bottom line of profit, people and planet.
I've translated reports for sugar beet manufacturers, internet start-ups, machinery producers, software providers and textile companies, to name just a few. And the more reports I've worked on, the more I've come to learn that sustainability reporting is my sweet spot.
After four years of learning on the job, I decided it was time to invest in a qualification and signed up to take the course to become a GRI Certified Sustainability Professional.
I thought the course would quickly confirm what I already knew. I couldn't have been more wrong. Fifty pages of notes and hours of online learning later, I finally have the certification.
Here are few things that I learned along the way:
1. Sustainability reporting is growing at a rapid pace. While just 12 per cent of companies published sustainability reports in 1993, this figure now stands at 80 per cent and over 90 per cent among the world's largest companies, the KPMG Survey of Sustainability Reporting 2020 found. Around three-quarters of the top 250 companies from the Global Fortune 500 chose to use the GRI standards to report their performance. While new laws and regulations are leaving their mark, there is also a growing understanding at management level that sustainability reporting demonstrates a commitment to transparency that attracts capital and talent and builds reputation and trust with ratings agencies.
2. C-suite backing and multi-department communication are key. Many of the case studies stressed the importance of C-suite support for sustainability to drive real change and secure the necessary budget. And an organisation needs more than just one sustainability officer; a typical sustainability report will involve many people and departments, including investor relations, communications and HR. It will require multiple meetings over six to ten months to make decisions on everything from the topics to cover in the materiality matrix to the format that the report will be published in (how about creating a dedicated website? Is a hard copy needed or even environmentally appropriate?). The team should make sure to avoid cherry-picking or SDG-washing (selecting the easiest targets and reporting on positive impacts while ignoring negative ones). And where possible, the report should showcase employees and their stories to build affinity and put a human face to corporate sustainability efforts.
3. The GRI standards are available in multiple languages. At last check, the GRI website had 11 different language versions (English, Spanish, Chinese, French, Arabic, Japanese, German, Italian, Vietnamese, Bahasa Indonesia and Portuguese). And, if you're quick, you can still apply for an in-house job as the Standards Translation Manager. The GRI Academy also recently started offering the course I took in Spanish.
The bottom line
I started the course back in the dark days of winter, and it took me just under six months to complete all five modules and exam using the self-paced learning route (total cost: EUR 1,250). After finishing the last course, I took a few days to look back over my notes and revise. The exam was a little more robust than I had anticipated, and I was glad that I had reviewed the main concepts outlined earlier in the course.
What's next? I'll be combining everything that I have learned over the past five years to give a presentation at this year's ATA Conference in Minneapolis. In the meantime, I'll be getting ready to translate my next sustainability report and trying to figure out exactly how many bottles you would need to put in a line to stretch to the moon and back...