Stacey Sprenkel spoke to Agenda about companies rethinking how they use the term ESG (environmental, social, and governance) amid backlash from politicians and other stakeholders.
For boards, it's important to gauge the sentiment of stakeholders on the company's ESG efforts to determine where they should focus while working closely with communications and marketing teams to determine whether it's time to shift the language applied to such efforts. According to Stacey, most companies are ultimately sticking to current sustainability-related strategies, whether they call them ESG or not.
"[The ESG backlash] is not impacting most of my clients and how they are thinking about what they do and what their goals are and what they are trying to accomplish," Stacey said. "I think for some companies it is impacting how they frame ESG and the language they use to talk about it may be shifting a little bit."
Stacey added: "Fundamentally, companies should, regardless of the language they are using, take a look and understand their risks and plans to mitigate those risks."
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