Creating a Corporate Sustainability Strategy in 2025: A Step-by-Step Guide

Do you want to create a corporate sustainability strategy that truly makes an impact? Are your customers demanding greener products and services or are you required to report your ESG performance to stakeholders in the future?

Sustainability, ESG and CSR are here to stay and you need a clear strategy to make an impact and stay competitive.

Whether you’re a CEO building your first green roadmap or a seasoned Chief Sustainability Officer refining existing initiatives, this step-by-step guide will help you chart a clear, strategic path toward lasting impact!

Why a Corporate Sustainability Strategy Matters

Companies need to have a good sustainability strategy in place to reduce their environmental impact, attract customers and employees and stay competitive against their competition. Moreover, many are required by law to report on their ESG and CSR measures.

A clearly defined sustainability strategy matters for several reasons.

First, remember the old saying that “failing to plan, is planning to fail”. This is true for anything else in your company from financials to supply chain and procurement and sustainability should be at the core of your business strategy!

Failing to plan for sustainability, is planning to fail in becoming sustainable!

Second, it helps you achieve measurable impact through reduced carbon emissions, optimized resource use, and improved ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) scores. In times of soaring energy prices and carbon pricing, the ROI of sustainability is increasing all the time.

Third, it provides a clear competitive advantage for your company! Sustainability is not just a buzzword for marketing campaigns but actually great for the planet and many customers and other stakeholders are now actively demanding this from their favorite brands!

And finally, it serves as a form of risk management by proactively addressing environmental and social issues, reducing the possibility of reputational damage, regulatory penalties, and supply chain disruptions.

As you can see, setting up a good corporate sustainability strategy sets you up for enhanced brand reputation, boosted employee engagement, and captures the attention of customers who care about eco-friendly products and services.

Step 1: Set a Clear Vision and Objectives

The starting point for any sustainability roadmap is a compelling vision that resonates with your organization’s values and long-term business goals. Remember the “failing to plan” quote from earlier?

Define Your Purpose

Begin by defining your purpose, and ask questions like “What does sustainability look like for our business in five, ten, or twenty years?” Linking your sustainability vision to broader company objectives like growth, profitability, or innovation helps embed these goals within the company’s DNA rather than treating them as side projects.

💡 Although sustainability heavily focuses on ESG impact, achieving sustainable business practices should be the goal of any company.

Identify Key Metrics

Identify which metrics you’ll track to measure your success, whether those metrics relate to carbon footprint, energy consumption, waste reduction, or diversity and inclusion. These metrics may be aligned with recognized industry standards such as the GRI, SASB, or UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

💡 Measurable KPIs and metrics prevent your sustainability strategy from becoming just another “nice-to-have”!

Step 2: Assess Your Current State

Before you can improve, you need an accurate baseline of your environmental and social impacts.

Conduct a sustainability audit or checkup to measure your current carbon emissions, energy usage, waste output, and social performance factors such as employee well-being and community involvement. Evaluate your existing initiatives and policies, identifying what works well and where you see gaps in performance or policy.

💡 We recommend you do this together with external experts to get objective results. At Reegy we have done dozens of sustainability checkups in the past year and understand how overwhelming this process may feel at first. Let’s talk and take the hassle out of it!

Then, benchmark your performance against industry peers to find best practices and emerging trends and make your company stand out from the crowd! Look at how leaders in your field handle reporting, engage stakeholders, and incorporate sustainable business practices to improve your own.

Pro Tip: Tools like our Reegy platform can automate data collection and provide real-time insights into carbon emissions and other key metrics, saving you weeks of manual calculation and reporting.

Step 3: Align and Engage Stakeholders

Stakeholder alignment is often the make-or-break element of any sustainability strategy. You can’t succeed if your employees, partners, customers, and investors aren’t on board!

Map Out Stakeholders

Start by mapping out both internal (executives, managers, employees) and external stakeholders (suppliers, customers, community members, regulators), recognizing how much influence each has and how your sustainability goals affect them. Also consider why some of them might oppose your measures!

Facilitate Open Dialogue

Once you’ve identified your stakeholders, host workshops, roundtables, or virtual town halls to gather feedback and address concerns. Encourage them to share ideas and co-create solutions, so they feel invested rather than dictated to. E.g. you could set up an anonymous “idea box” at your office so nobody fears repercussions from their suggestions.

Clarify Roles and Responsibilities

Clarify roles and responsibilities by assigning specific tasks to individuals and teams. It can help to create a dedicated sustainability team or hire a sustainability manager or CSO for your company.

Pro Tip: Engaged stakeholders are more likely to champion your sustainability initiatives both internally and externally. Use Reegy’s stakeholder engagement module to make this super simple!

Step 4: Develop an Action Plan

Once you know where you stand and have your stakeholders aligned, it’s time to turn your vision into action.

The first priority is setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) goals.

For example, you might aim to reduce Scope 1 and Scope 2 carbon emissions by 30% within three years or source half of your materials from certified sustainable suppliers by the following year. Prioritize initiatives based on which ones are most impactful and urgent, balancing “quick wins” (like switching to LED lighting) with long-term transformational changes (such as revamping your supply chains).

Create a timeline that outlines milestones in the short, medium, and long term, establishing checkpoints to measure progress and make adjustments as needed.

💡 Consider allocating a budget for research and development to explore sustainable innovations that may require an upfront investment.

Step 5: Integrate Sustainability into Company Culture

A sustainability strategy is not meant to be hidden behind the “sustainability department” doors. Every member of your organization should be included in this process and feel like sustainability is at the heart of your company culture.

Incentivize Eco-Friendly Behaviors

You can start by incentivizing eco-friendly behaviors through rewards for meeting sustainability goals or proposing green initiatives. These incentives can be as simple as office-wide recycling competitions or offering remote work options to cut scope 3 employee commuting emissions.

Train and Educate

Training and educational sessions will help everyone at your company understand why these goals matter and how they have an active role to play.

Highlight how day-to-day actions like shutting down computers or turning off lights can reduce energy consumption or encourage circularity in your product development and purchases.

Communicate Consistently

Communication is key for your sustainability strategy. Both achievements and setbacks should be treated openly through newsletters, intranet posts, and all-hands meetings, so your employees and stakeholders have clear picture of where the company stands.

Pro Tip: Visibility is vital—make sure your sustainability metrics and milestones are easily accessible. Dashboards (like the ones in Reegy) can help employees track progress in real time.

Step 6: Measure, Report, and Refine

Sustainability is never a one-and-done project. It’s an ongoing cycle of goal-setting, measurement, and improvement.

Set Up Performance Tracking

Track your performance with a carbon accounting software and other analytics tools to monitor everything from emissions to waste reduction. Preferably you have already started using one in step 2 when assessing your current state and corporate carbon footprint.

What’s important – and what sets Reegy’s holistic platform apart from other offerings on the market – is to complement your quantitative KPIs with qualitative indicators like employee engagement and community impact. Moreover, make sure to look beyond just the environmental impact and include all aspects of ESG and CSR!

Report Transparently

Report your findings on a regular basis, sharing updates with investors, employees, and customers, and follow frameworks such as the GRI or SASB for standardization. Transparency not only builds trust but also fosters a culture of accountability.

💡 As your sustainability strategy and actions progress, you may find unexpected aspects and challenges or discover more efficient ways to achieve your goals. That’s good!! Don’t be discouraged if you did not foresee everything when you started out and embrace agility and the principle of continuous improvement.

Bringing It All Together

Designing a corporate sustainability strategy is as much about organizational change as it is about hitting green targets. By following these steps – defining a vision, assessing your current state, aligning stakeholders, developing an action plan, integrating sustainability into company culture, and measuring progress – you set your business up for long-term success.

At Reegy, we believe in following a sustainability simplified approach. Our platform combines carbon accounting and stakeholder engagement with goal setting, CSRD, reporting, and impact so you can make your sustainability strategy come to life!

Ready to take your first (or next) step toward a more sustainable future? Get in touch to learn how we can streamline your sustainability management and empower your business to thrive in an eco-conscious world.