You know your business needs to address social sustainability. The question isn’t whether, it’s how. Where do you start when you’re already juggling growth targets, cash flow, and customer acquisition?

In a recent episode of FuturePlus’s Business of Sustainability podcast, Rachel Sadka, Director of Social Sustainability at EY, provided a masterclass in practical implementation for growing businesses. Her approach cuts through complexity with a clear message: start with strategy, not policies.

Let’s break down exactly how to begin your journey.

Why This Matters for Your Business

Before diving into implementation, let’s address the fundamental question: why should you prioritise this work?

Rachel identifies four drivers that make the business case compelling:

• While regulation provides a baseline push, especially for organisations not yet convinced of the value, the real case goes much deeper.
• Reputation risk is real. As Rachel notes, “every few weeks you’ll see something in the press that’s incredibly embarrassing for an organisation around human rights abuses, culture, behaviour from leadership.” In today’s connected world, a single incident can devastate years of careful brand-building.
• Investors increasingly care. Social sustainability metrics impact your bottom line and investment attractiveness. Organisations that ignore these factors are leaving value on the table.

But the most powerful driver? Direct value creation. Rachel worked with a transport company 

whose engagement issues and high absenteeism were crushing productivity. When leadership faced their cultural assessment results, despite them being “quite damning”, and took genuine action, they saw measurable improvements in engagement scores within months. This wasn’t about compliance; it was about fixing what was broken in their business model.

The businesses thriving in this space aren’t treating it as a side project. They’re recognising that happy, engaged workforces drive productivity, innovation, and growth.

The Common Pitfall to Avoid

The most frequent mistake Rachel sees? Treating social sustainability as just an HR 

responsibility. “We’ll often meet with the HR director, and they’ll say, ‘Ok, fine, I can give you all the information you need,'” Rachel explains. “And the first thing we say is, ‘That’s great, but we need to talk to your experts. We need to talk to your leaders. We need to talk to your CFO.'”

When social sustainability lives only in HR, it becomes a “nice-to-have “—corporate volunteering or add-ons rather than a strategic imperative. Real transformation happens when you embed these considerations into everything your business does: from procurement to communications, from product development to customer service.

For growing businesses, this actually represents an advantage. You’re more agile than large corporations. You can integrate sustainability thinking across your operation without navigating layers of bureaucracy. The question is whether you will.

How to Actually Begin – Four Essential Steps

So how do you start? Rachel’s framework is refreshingly straightforward:

1. Connect it to Your Business Strategy

“The starting point has to be: what are you trying to achieve as a business?” Rachel emphasises. 

“What are your challenges? What’s getting in your way?”

Don’t start by writing policies or choosing initiatives. Start by understanding how social sustainability connects to your actual business objectives. Struggling to retain talent? Having trouble accessing certain customer segments? Facing productivity issues? These aren’t separate from social sustainability, they’re often symptoms of gaps in how you’re approaching people and culture.

2. Conduct an Honest Assessment

Where are you now? Where do you want to be? Rachel uses diagnostic tools, but the principle applies at any scale: you need a clear view of your current state. This isn’t about perfection. As Alex Smith noted in the conversation, “you don’t have to necessarily be perfect, but you’ve got to show progress, and transparency is part of that.” Your workforce likely already knows where the issues are… ask them.

3. Identify What’s Most Relevant to YOUR Business

This is critical. Not everything matters equally to every business. “Things like human rights and supply chain, if you’re a large organisation with a very complex supply chain, that’s going to be top of your agenda,” Rachel explains. “Versus for a smaller organisation that’s UK-based, it might be something they need to be thinking about, but it’s not necessarily the most critical.”

What’s material depends on your sector, your business model, and your specific challenges. A professional services firm faces different priorities than a manufacturing company. A B2B business faces different considerations than a consumer retail business. Don’t try to do everything, focus on what will have the greatest impact in your specific context.

4. Set Your Strategy with Clear Measures

From the beginning, you need to define what success looks like. Rachel is clear about this: “You need to be able to say what success looks like and some of those metrics will be softer, some of them will be slightly harder to measure, but you need to set some kind of targets.”

FuturePlus emphasises: measure what matters. Don’t just measure what’s easy to capture. If you’re focused on culture, track engagement and absenteeism. If you’re working on socioeconomic diversity, monitor where you’re sourcing talent and retention rates across different groups. If you’ve implemented a new policy, like the menopause or surrogacy policies Rachel mentioned, track not just adoption but outcomes. Are people using it? Are they staying with the company?

Leadership and Grassroots

Here’s where many businesses get execution wrong: they either impose change from the top without buy-in, or they let grassroots enthusiasm run without strategic direction. Rachel’s approach combines both: “It’s almost like you need to take that and galvanise the people who are enthusiastic and are trying to make things happen and empower them with a strategic and a more kind of road map as to where you want to get to.”

Many organisations already have passionate employees, wellbeing champions, inclusion advocates, and culture leads. These people are assets. But without strategic support, infrastructure, and clear priorities, their efforts remain scattered. Give them a roadmap. Give them resources. Give them leadership backing.

This combined approach is especially powerful for growing businesses where leadership is close to the ground and can move quickly.

The Value Question

One principle emerged repeatedly in the conversation, if there’s no value at every level, something’s wrong with your approach.

Rachel developed EY’s Total Reporting Framework to integrate financial and non-financial reporting, giving leaders a complete picture for decision-making. The insight applies to businesses of all sizes: your sustainability work shouldn’t feel like a burden added onto “real work.” It should be woven into how you make decisions, allocate resources, and measure success.

Ask yourself, does the person collecting this data see value in it? Does your leadership team use it to make better decisions? Do your employees know how this connects to their daily work? If the answer is no at any level, you haven’t embedded it properly yet.

The goal isn’t compliance for its own sake; it’s using data and insight to build a better business.

Moving Forward

Social impact and sustainability aren’t destinations; they’re ongoing journeys of improvement.

The businesses getting this right aren’t perfect. They’re the ones asking better questions, measuring what actually matters, and connecting these efforts directly to business outcomes.

Rachel’s advice for the path ahead? Focus on reporting that links sustainability to financial metrics, making it value-added rather than compliance-driven. The organisations that prepare now, understanding their data, getting leaders aligned, tying it to business strategy, will be the ones that thrive as expectations increase.

The best time to start was yesterday. The second-best time is today. And the good news? You don’t have to figure it all out alone.

Ready to explore this further? Listen to the full conversation between Alex Smith and Rachel Sadka on the FuturePlus Business of Sustainability podcast for deeper insights into building social sustainability into your growth strategy.

Want to turn insight into action? FuturePlus provides the tools that growing businesses need, accessible, affordable sustainability solutions that help you measure, manage, improve and report on your social impact. Using primary-sourced, verified data, we help you make informed decisions with your own information. 

We’re here to be your collaborative partner, to demystify the language, and to support your impact journey. Because businesses of all sizes deserve the power to change their future. Let’s talk about how we can help.