There are many ways to define Corporate Citizenship, and it is critical for a company to focus on the ones most material to its business operations and competitive landscape.

As such, one of the more important organization-wide activities we undertook in 2020 was to conduct a formal materiality assessment to provide all of our stakeholder groups an opportunity to tell us what kind of value, broadly speaking, we should be creating through our business operations.

The assessment included topics from the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Sustainability Reporting Standards. We established key sustainability issues, which were ranked by 26 internal and 21 external stakeholders through a survey—and for additional input, our outside provider, Quantis, conducted 10 interviews across 21 participants.¹ The assessment helped us create a focused, structured approach to environmental impact metrics.

They fall into three broad categories of focus:

Each of these items has corresponding metrics so that we can establish a baseline of performance, set goals for improvement, and monitor performance to promote accountability. In certain cases, the materiality assessment highlights an area where we had established a range of practices and outcomes. In other cases, the assessment has prompted us to set goals. In short, we undertook this process to point us to those areas where we could provide the most value for stakeholders in the future.