Developing and testing a Tool for Rapid Assessment of Sustainability in Organisations

Abstract

Assessment and reporting has been recognised as one of the key drivers for sustainability in organisations; however, most organisations' reports fall short of sustainability guidelines and the available sustainability assessment and reporting (SAR) frameworks have been limited by several issues. The aim of this paper is to develop and test a rapid sustainability in organisations framework that includes all the sustainability dimensions and their interactions using a manageable number of indicators. A survey was developed to investigate the impacts and contribution of organisations to sustainability, where 224 full responses were obtained. The responses were analysed using descriptive analysis, Friedman tests, analyses of variance, ratio analyses, and correlations. The results show that organisations still address sustainability through compartmentalisation and skewed to the social dimension of sustainability. The results also show that the understanding of SAR in practice in organisations is more advanced regarding sustainability interrelations than the available frameworks and theoretical discourses. The ratio analyses provide a more complete understanding than a ranking analysis. Easier and faster SAR can help better address the dimensions of sustainability and their interrelations, as well as the positive and negative contributions, in order to avoid reinforcing limited and incomplete sustainability efforts. The proposed framework (Tool for Rapid Assessment of Sustainability in Organisations [TRASO]) can serve as a first step for organisations to detect strong and weak points in their sustainability efforts by providing a rapid, balanced and holistic assessment of sustainability issues, which can, in turn, help in the decision-making process in becoming more sustainable.