Last week, Fujitsu released its Global Sustainability Transformation Survey Report 2022 – ‘Accelerating sustainability with a digital-first approach’. This survey analyses key challenges and critical success factors of sustainability transformation and makes important recommendations for the future. In order to better understand the level of sustainability transformation and how digital transformation is facilitating this transition, Fujitsu commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a poll in February 2022 among 1,800 decision-makers in nine different countries. The results of the poll showed that company priorities are increasingly shifting toward sustainability. The poll also examines four crucial success elements for sustainable transformation as well as seven major difficulties, and it offers four significant suggestions. We anticipate that corporate executives who are devoted to sustainability would benefit from this study.
Key Findings of the report include:
Sustainability as a Management Priority
The survey’s findings indicate that 41% of participants rank sustainability as one of their top three management objectives, indicating a significant increase in the significance of sustainability in corporate strategy and decision-making over the previous two years. The major drivers of this trend were the younger generation’s growing knowledge of sustainability (54%), government rules and regulations, and consumer group requests (49%).
Sustainability Maturity Has a Long Way to Go
According to the report, 21% of the businesses have already produced benefits from their sustainability measures. Only 5% of the executives, however, have created a vision for sustainability activities, an organization-wide sustainability plan, and significant outcomes through all-encompassing actions. A corporate sustainability plan, on the other hand, was unable to be created or implemented by 54% of the respondents.
Digital-first Approach is Key to Sustainability
The survey revealed that sustainability leaders had a high level of maturity in four areas: purpose-driven, human-centric, data-driven, and connected, suggesting that these four areas may be significant success factors for attaining success in sustainability projects. A high association was found between sustainability maturity and digital maturity, and 67% of respondents thought that digital transformation will help sustainability succeed. This shows how promoting sustainability requires a digital-first strategy to be successful.
Sustainability Challenges and Ways to Solve Them
A lack of executive alignment in sustainability vision and implementation was highlighted by 38% of survey participants as a major obstacle to sustainability initiative implementation, along with 35% internal opposition and skepticism. The poll further showed that there is a significant problem in increasing both the financial value, including sales and earnings, and the non-financial value, including the development of environmental and social value. CEOs may resolve this problem by exercising purpose-driven leadership, creating strategies with both financial and non-financial objectives, and utilizing digital technologies in collaboration with technology partners.
Fujitsu is a leading provider of IT-based business solutions for the global marketplace. With approximately 130,000 employees supporting customers in 180 countries, Fujitsu is one of the world’s largest IT service companies.
Since 2008, Fujitsu has used Cority’s (formerly Greenstone) Sustainability Cloud software solutions and supporting services to collect, manage, monitor and reporting environment and ESG data across its global business.
The data captured from the 400 Fujitsu sites is used to report emissions centrally to the Fujitsu Headquarters in Japan. This data forms the basis of the emissions reporting included in Fujitsu Group’s annual Environmental report and other reporting such as CDP, Business in the Community, GRI and ISO 26000. Fujitsu has been included on the prestigious CDP ‘A List’ since 2017.
