Who Is Involved? Stakeholders, Teams & Roles

Who Is Involved? Stakeholders, Teams & Roles

An ESG report is not written in isolation. It is assembled from data, narratives, and approvals that come from across the entire organization. Understanding who is involved (and how they behave) is as important as understanding the frameworks themselves.

This lesson maps out the people side of an ESG reporting engagement: who you will work with, what each team provides, and the two stakeholder archetypes that will make your life difficult if you do not see them coming.

Your Primary Contact: The Sustainability Team

In most organizations, your main point of contact is the sustainability team (sometimes called the ESG team, CSR team, or a variant). This is the team that owns the report. They coordinate internally, manage the timeline, and serve as the bridge between you and the rest of the organization.

In smaller companies, "the sustainability team" might be one person wearing multiple hats. In larger ones, it might be a dedicated department with a Chief Sustainability Officer. Either way, this is who you report to, who you escalate to, and who you rely on to open doors to other departments.

The quality of your engagement often depends on how effective this primary contact is. A strong sustainability lead who has internal credibility can get you data, approvals, and decisions quickly. A weak one (someone who is new to the role or lacks organizational clout) means you will spend a lot of time navigating the organization yourself.

The Supporting Departments

ESG reports pull data from nearly every corner of a company. Here is who provides what:

HR / Human Resources

• Employee demographics, diversity data, gender breakdowns
• Training hours and programs (this is notoriously hard to collect since most companies do not track it well)
• Worker benefits, parental leave, health insurance coverage
• Health and safety metrics (incident rates, lost-time injuries, fatalities)
• Grievance mechanisms and compliance with labor laws (e.g., POSH Act in India)

Operations / Facilities

• Energy consumption data (electricity, fuel, renewable vs. non-renewable)
• Water withdrawal, consumption, and discharge
• Waste generation, recycling rates, hazardous waste
• Emissions data (often Scope 1 and Scope 2)
• This data is frequently scattered across facilities, plants, and regional offices

Finance

• Economic performance indicators
• Tax governance and transparency
• Investment in sustainability initiatives
• Revenue breakdowns relevant to ESG disclosures

Health & Safety

• Sometimes separate from HR, sometimes combined
• Detailed safety metrics, near-miss reporting, safety training records

CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility)

• Community engagement programs and spend
• Social impact data, beneficiary numbers
• Volunteering hours, donation figures

IT / Data Governance

• Cybersecurity policies and incidents
• Data privacy practices
• IT governance frameworks
• This is an increasingly important section, especially as IFRS and other standards ask about data governance

The Consultant vs. In-House Dynamic

If you are a consultant (external advisor), your role is to drive the process: build templates, collect data, write content, manage timelines, and deliver the report. You are the engine.

If you are in-house, you wear two hats: you are both the coordinator and the contributor. You need to navigate internal politics, chase colleagues for data, and write sections yourself, all while managing up to leadership.

Either way, the dynamic is the same: you depend on other people for inputs, and those people have their own priorities. ESG reporting is rarely anyone's primary job except yours.

The Board Approval Chain

Every ESG report goes through an approval chain before publication. Typically:

1. The sustainability team reviews and finalizes the draft
2. Relevant department heads sign off on their sections (HR signs off on social data, operations on environmental data)
3. Senior leadership (CXO level) reviews the full document
4. The Chairman or CEO approves the final version (and their message)
5. The board may do a final review, especially if the report is linked to regulatory filings

This chain is where delays happen. Each level of review introduces feedback, revisions, and sometimes contradictory instructions. Understanding this chain upfront, and planning for it in your timeline, saves you from unpleasant surprises.

The Two Stakeholder Archetypes You Need to Watch For

Every consultant and every in-house sustainability professional will encounter these two types. Learning to recognize them early is a survival skill.

🦤 The DRONGON (Wrong-on)

DRONGONs are people who do not understand the work but keep showing up as if they do. They insert themselves into the review process, provide feedback that sounds authoritative but is not rooted in anything substantive, and consume enormous amounts of your time.

How to spot a DRONGON:

• Their feedback is either extremely generic ("this needs to be better," "make it more impactful") or absurdly minuscule ("this comma should be a semicolon," "change this font")
• They never provide technical or communication-oriented feedback (nothing about the substance of what you have written)
• They want everything reviewed again. And again. And again. No number of review rounds is enough.
• They want to get on a call for everything. A question that could be answered in a two-line email becomes a 45-minute meeting.
• Key trait: high noise, low signal. They generate a lot of activity but add almost no value to the report.

How to manage a DRONGON:

• Set clear review milestones with defined scope ("this review round is for factual accuracy only")
• Put feedback in writing: ask them to mark up the document rather than giving verbal comments that are hard to act on
• Limit review rounds upfront in the project plan ("we have budgeted for three rounds of revision")
• Acknowledge their input quickly but do not let their feedback derail the timeline

🕳️ The BOGON (Bog-on)

BOGONs are the opposite problem. They give you nothing during the process (no data, no feedback, no responses to your emails) and then blame you when the work is not done or not done well.

How to spot a BOGON:

• They do not respond to data requests, or respond weeks late with incomplete information
• They skip review meetings or send a junior team member who cannot make decisions
• When the report is delayed or a section is incomplete, they claim they were never asked, or that they gave you everything you needed (they did not)
• Key trait: absent during work, present during blame.

How to manage a BOGON:

• Keep a paper trail. This is your single most important defense. Every data request, every follow-up, every escalation should be in email or a documented message. When the BOGON claims they were never asked, you have receipts.
• Send regular status updates that explicitly note what is pending from whom ("waiting on HR data since March 3, third follow-up sent")
• Escalate early: do not wait until the deadline to flag that a department is not responding
• In the project kickoff, get explicit agreement on who provides what and by when, properly documented and shared

Why People Management Is the Job

Here is the uncomfortable truth that no framework document will teach you: ESG reporting is 30% technical work and 70% people management. The frameworks are learnable. The writing is a skill you develop. But getting data out of reluctant departments, managing stakeholders who think they know better, and navigating approval chains with conflicting feedback is where engagements succeed or fail.

The best ESG reporting professionals are not the ones who have memorized every GRI indicator. They are the ones who know how to read a room, when to push and when to wait, and how to keep a project moving when half the people involved do not consider it their priority.