Planning certainty starts with clear priorities
Initial Situation
For a listed company, long-term planning certainty increasingly depends on one question: which environmental and social issues are truly material to its business, and where should it direct its financial and human resources and their development? The expectations of legislators, investors, customers and employees naturally feed into this assessment. In the end, however, it is up to the company itself to decide which issues take business priority.
Challenge
A listed Swiss industrial company had already classified more than twenty topics as material as part of its reporting. However, they were only loosely linked to its business strategy, which made robust planning and communication decisions difficult. An analysis that simply works through regulatory requirements produces a long list, but no strategic priorities.
Regulatory requirements are a tool, not a definition of goals. Those who let them lead the way confuse completeness with relevance, and end up planning around the very things that drive company value.
Solution
Nuovia approached the materiality analysis from a strategic perspective. The existing topics were revised, sharpened and anchored in the business strategy until more than twenty reporting and compliance topics had been distilled into a few strategic fields of action. Interviews with investors, internal specialist departments and key customers served as a calibration tool, and their assessments and perspectives fed directly into the prioritisation. An update of the regulatory analysis was produced at the same time, with little additional effort. Finally, strategy workshops and a final decision paper for the Board of Directors brought the results into operational implementation.
Impact
The greatest benefit shows in medium- and long-term resource planning. The company aligns its funding, development priorities and communication with the topics that matter to its core business and its key stakeholders. In this case, governance topics such as data security and the protection of intellectual property carried significant weight. As the company expanded internationally, social issues gained regional importance for productivity. From an environmental perspective, the availability of critical raw materials emerged as an impending bottleneck.
Nuovia's Scope of Services
- Strategic materiality analysis with prioritised fields of action
- CSRD-compliant materiality analysis (double materiality assessment)
- Investor and stakeholder survey
- Strategy workshops and training
Frequently Asked Questions
The CSRD materiality assessment is designed for completeness: it captures every topic that may be subject to reporting requirements. The strategic materiality analysis starts with the question of which topics are actually relevant to the business and its key stakeholders, and condenses them into a few fields of action. The result serves as a basis for business decisions on the company's future development.
Yes. In the case described, the regulatory analysis was carried out in the same process, with little additional effort. The difference lies in the starting point: taking a strategic approach delivers both a robust basis for decision-making and regulatory compliance from a single process.
Many materiality analyses mix topics with targets and measures, both in how they are worded and in how they are structured. This makes it harder for internal and external stakeholders to interpret them correctly.
In recent years, we have also repeatedly observed a rigid focus on reporting standards such as the ESRS or GRI and their implementation requirements. But what is right for risk assessment and compliance does not necessarily apply to business development and corporate decision-making. This often calls for a strategic lens to separate the material topics seen from a risk perspective from those seen from an opportunity perspective.
Their assessments help calibrate the prioritisation. Interviews with investors, key customers and internal specialist departments reveal which topics carry weight with the most important stakeholders. The decision on which topics take priority, however, rests with the company itself. Finding the right channels is essential: robust results from stakeholder engagement require skilful communication that is tailored to each target group.
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