Integrating an Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) Strategy into GRC

A Healthcare & Human Services Case Study

OVERVIEW

With new market demand for an effective and long-term strategy to improve ESG initiatives at Sevita, Onspring system administrators identified the platform as a simple tool to execute the plans and year-over-year performance tracking. Annual self-assessments evaluated the organization’s performance across seven focal areas, and automated notifications to assign owners with resolution tasks for underperforming scores.

For the first time, Sevita could track, manage, and report ESG performance to management and the Board without effort.

Profile

Company:
Sevita (formerly known as The MENTOR Network)

Industry:
Home & community-based healthcare

Reach:
40 states
35,000 employees
50,000 individuals served

“Onspring is fantastic. We can easily track ESG assessments & tasks while viewing our ESG score year-over-year.”

Jennifer Neville, Associate General Counsel, Corporate

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Challenge

Market demand from the community and stakeholders helped Sevita develop a long-term strategy for successful ESG initiatives. While the organization had steps in place to improve existing ESG practices, the goal was to demonstrate they were a best-in-class ESG organization.

This goal meant continuous self-reviews and modifications for ongoing improvement. Prior to Onspring, Sevita had no scalable method to launch annual assessments or execute an annual ESG plan that targeted focal areas for improvement.

Solution

Sevita established seven ESG pillars to focus their strategy and define specific improvement areas:

Community Engagement
Corporate Governance Policies & Practices
Cybersecurity Policies & Processes
Diversity & Inclusion Policies & Programs
Environmental Health Services (EHS) Programs
Employment Policies
Supply Chain Policies & Risk Management

Using Onspring, all ESG efforts could be tracked against these pillars and re-evaluated annually to measure progress and determine adjustments that improved practices, policies, and training initiatives.

ESG Process Flow

Draft Self-Assessment Questionnaire

Sevita created self-assessments to evaluate company performance in each of the seven identified pillars. These assessments reviewed multiple aspects of their business practices, including policy documentation and enforcement, and employee training.

They also devised a sliding scale – with 5 representing ‘complete’ and 1 representing ‘incomplete – to quantitatively review each question and answer in the assessment.

Deploy Annual Assessments

Scheduled annual self-assessments initiated from Onspring tracked responses back into a centralized dashboard. This provided real-time visibility to managers and executives who were interested in the impacts of ESG improvement initiatives.

Track Performance

Metrics displayed on the live ESG dashboard track completeness against the goals Sevita established for each of the seven ESG pillars. As annual self-assessments are completed, calculations in Onspring automatically adjust to inform the level of effort needed to reach their goals.

ESG Reporting Approach

Instigate Improvement

Sevita assigned ESG owners to each question within the self-assessments to designate responsibility for improvement actions. If scores become less than desirable, the assigned owner receives an automatic notification with a task to review the situation and create an intervention, or improvement plan.

Personalized Work Queues

Multiple tasks might be needed to reach full compliance within an ESG pillar, so personalized dashboards created in Onspring help task owners manage their workload.

Task owners could work from their individual list of priorities. As tasks are marked complete, ESG pillar scores automatically update to provide real-time ESG performance to everyone.

Prevent Future Interventions

Sevita will be able to compare year-over-year ESG performance. Using this data, they can identify which pillars required the most effort to improve, or where they perform strongly without effort. These data points help guide the decision-making of policies, practices, and ongoing employee initiatives.