While sustainability may seem like a buzzword, it plays an essential role in the success of any business. However, there’s more than just one type of sustainability your firm should pay attention to. In fact, there are three pillars of sustainability, each of which measures different aspects of a company.

In this guide, we’ll explore these 3 pillars of sustainability—looking at their basics and why they’re important. We’ll also cover how you can take your company’s sustainability efforts to the next level with a popular productivity tool: time tracking software.

What are the Three Pillars of Sustainability in Business?

The three pillars of sustainability play a foundational role in any responsible company’s operations. They are:

• Environmental Sustainability
• Social Sustainability
• Governance Sustainability

These 3 sustainability pillars make up the acronym ESG, which is a concept that you’ve undoubtedly heard of.

As implied by their names, each pillar addresses responsibility in different areas of business. The challenges in these areas differ quite a lot as well, along with their solutions and best practices. Let’s now explore each pillar in-depth to learn about these differences.

Exploring the Three Pillars of Sustainability In-Depth

While all 3 pillars of sustainability are important, some of them are more widely known than others. Let’s start with the most known one—environmental sustainability.

Environmental Sustainability

As hinted by its name, environmental sustainability addresses concerns relating to the environment. This can take a few different forms, like a company’s carbon footprint, impact on wildlife, and more. Factors that can contribute to challenges in this area include inefficient equipment and suboptimal policies. Because of this, environmental sustainability can be the most difficult of the three pillars of sustainability to implement.

Companies are the most likely to leave issues in this area untouched, as they’re usually the most expensive to deal with. Changing outdated equipment is often not only costly but also time-consuming. Consequently, avoiding environmental sustainability issues before they can develop into something bigger is quite important.

Social Sustainability

Social sustainability is about the people that your business interacts with. This includes not only your staff—but also your customers, the employees of partner companies, and anyone else your firm may impact with its operations. For most types of businesses, however, you’ll only have to worry about treating your employees and customers fairly and in a sustainable manner.

Governance Sustainability

Governance sustainability relates to how your business is managed and run. It includes compliance with laws and ethical standards set in your industry. Typically, ensuring governance sustainability is the easiest of the three sustainability pillars. A healthy amount of transparency in your processes can cover most of your efforts in this pillar. Implementing strong resiliency programs, like crisis management and cybersecurity strategies, can help take your business even further in this regard.

Enhancing Compliance with All Three Pillars of Sustainability with Time Tracking Software

If you’re looking to enhance your company’s compliance efforts in any of the three pillars of sustainability we covered, you have many options. A great one is to use time tracking software, high-quality examples of which are excellent for different long-term strategies. We’ll now cover how such apps can help your company’s sustainability efforts in each pillar.

Steps to Enhance Environmental Sustainability

The environmental sustainability efforts we’re going to cover are the following:

• Reducing negative externalities by transitioning to working from home
• Offsetting negative externalities through different strategies

Transitioning to Work from Home

Teleworking or remote working arrangements can have lots of benefits for companies. Besides increasing productivity and saving your staff time, they can also reduce your company’s environmental impact. Time tracking software can be a vital tool for implementing such working arrangements. High-quality apps like WebWork can help you transition away from working in the office smoothly—without sacrificing productivity in the process. 

Offsetting Negative Externalities

Sometimes your business can’t avoid certain negative effects on the environment. However, what it can do instead is offset them in a variety of ways. You can plan these offsetting measures in a high-quality time tracker to enhance their impact. This can be especially useful if you want to have more than one of these campaigns in your business. You can manage each as a project in an app with project management functionality, like WebWork. You’ll then be able to break down your goals into tasks to help your team make steady progress.

Enhancing Social Responsibility

The social responsibility efforts we’ll cover mainly relate to your employees. They are the following:

• Maintaining a healthy work-life balance across your staff
• Ensuring balanced workloads and avoiding overworking
• Improving professional engagement and satisfaction levels

Maintaining a Healthy Work-Life Balance

A healthy work-life balance is vital for professionals in all types of teams. Not only does overworking result in an array of health issues in the long term, but it also contributes to lower productivity levels. Fortunately, ensuring your staff don’t let work get in the way of their personal responsibilities is easy with a time tracker. Apps like WebWork even offer dedicated work-life balance tracking features. These can help you get a quick glimpse into your team’s work-life balance to identify any potential problems.

Ensuring Balanced Workloads Across Your Team

Closely tied to our last point, putting a lot of stress on your team can have negative effects—even if it doesn’t affect their lives outside of work. A time tracker with task management functionality can help you balance your staff’s workloads more effectively. You’ll be able to split larger tasks into smaller ones and assign more members to them if you need to.

Improving Professional Engagement and Satisfaction

Professional engagement is an important metric in the success of any business. At the same time, high levels of it also result in increased job satisfaction. Achieving this can be simple with a time tracker. This will involve setting clear goals, tracking your staff’s performance, and rewarding their efforts appropriately. Check out our guide on improving employee engagement with a time tracker to learn more about the topic.

Improving Governance Sustainability

The last of the three pillars of sustainability we’ll be covering is governance sustainability.

• Enhancing reporting and auditing efforts across your business
• Increasing employee accountability, especially across your management team
• Streamlining overall management in your business

Enhancing Reporting and Auditing Efforts

Reporting and auditing play a big role in any company’s governance sustainability efforts. Many high-quality time trackers can help you with this. Using them, you can monitor the work of your managers to ensure your business is run sustainably. Some apps, like WebWork, even let you keep track of important changes in your workspace with audit logs.

Increasing Employee Accountability

Accountability is vital for ensuring your team don’t make any bad decisions for your company. While this especially applies to your management team, ensuring high accountability across your staff can have many benefits. Check out our guide on employee accountability to explore the topic further.

Streamlining Overall Management

A big part of any sustainability initiative is increasing efficiency. Streamlining your firm’s management with a time tracker does exactly this. High-quality apps like WebWork let you simplify lots of different management tasks. For example, you can transition your team’s leave management to an app with a dedicated feature. This will save you lots of time on reviewing, approving, or denying leave requests.

Concluding Thoughts

The three pillars of sustainability are concepts that every business should care about—regardless of its size. Ensuring compliance in all three areas will mean that your firm can continue on its path to success for the foreseeable future. While there are lots of ways of achieving this, one of the best ones involves high-quality time tracking software. These apps can make it easier to reach your sustainability targets and speed up the growth of your company.