Business leaders are seeing a wide range of value creation benefits from their companies’ sustainability activities, with more than 60% reporting improved employee attraction and retention, and half citing higher sales and lower costs, although only around a third of companies have highly integrated sustainability into decision making, according to a new survey released by ERM Sustainability Institute, Salesforce, GlobeScan, Accounting for Sustainability and SustainableIT.org.

For the report, the organizations surveyed 320 senior professionals, including 75% at the C-Suite, Director, and Management levels, across a wide range of sectors and regions. The report follows a similar survey released in early 2024 by Salesforce and Globescan.

The survey found that two thirds of executives reported that sustainability is “very important” to their companies’ commercial success, up slightly from last year, with executives highlighting a wide range of value creation drivers. The top benefits reported included enhanced brand and reputation, cited by 74% of respondents, followed by stronger stakeholder and community relations at 70%.

The business leaders also cited key operational benefits from sustainability actions, including employee attraction and retention reported by 61%, growing sales by 49%, and increased efficiency and reduced costs by 50%. Additionally, 56% of respondents said that sustainability actions helped drive supply chain resiliency, up from only 44% last year.

Despite the perceived benefits, however, only 37% of respondents reported that sustainability is “very integrated” into their companies’ core business strategies, remaining flat with last year’s survey.

Notably, these “Advanced Integrators” were much more likely to report benefits from their sustainability actions across all categories, with 67% citing growing sales, 65% increasing efficiencies and reducing costs, and 70% reporting improved employee attraction and retention.

Advanced Integrators were also more likely to report that mandatory sustainability reporting is driving value creation opportunities, compared with 39% of other respondents.

Overall, 44% of respondents said that mandatory sustainability reporting is driving collaboration supporting value creation opportunities, with another 35% citing only compliance benefits. By function, finance leaders were the most likely to cite value creation opportunities from mandatory sustainability reporting at 61%, compared with 45% of IT execs, and only 39% of sustainability professionals.

Finance and technology were seen as the key functions within within organizations for sustainability progress, cited by 77% and 76% of respondents, respectively, as important. Within these functions, 61% of finance leaders and 46% of IT said that sustainability considerations ranked “high” or “very high” in their decision-making.

Despite the centrality of finance and technology to sustainability actions, however, respondents reported low levels of confidence in their sustainability skills, with only 32% of finance leaders and 23% of IT reporting “high” or “very high” sustainability understanding.

The report found that only around 30% of companies have access to high quality sustainability data, up slightly from 27% last year. Notably, Advanced Integrators were much more likely, at 50%, to report having high quality sustainability data, compared with only 18% of other companies.

The report also found that while very few executives are currently seeing strong sustainability benefits from AI, although many expect this to improve in the near future. Only 6% of respondents said that AI has already delivered significant value for sustainability, while 50% anticipate that AI will become more valuable for sustainability over the next 2 years.

Click here to access the report.