Jill Klindt is in a position that screams synergy: she’s a CFO with ESG reporting in her remit for Workiva, a company that develops financial and ESG reporting software.
Klindt has worked at the company for 15 years and is also executive chair of Workiva’s ESG task force, which ensures the company “tracks a course for consistent ESG progress and excellence,” according to Workiva’s website.
The company’s ESG reporting initiatives “blend in with our external and with our product focus as well, so they are very interconnected, and that’s not the same at a lot of companies,” Klindt told CFO Brew during an interview at Workiva’s Amplify 2024 conference earlier this fall.
Workiva, which employed more than 2,500 people at the end of 2023 and reported nearly $178 million in Q2 2024 revenue, according to SEC filings, uses its own platform for its reporting. (The company will release its Q3 earnings today after the market closes.) This gives Klindt a multifaceted view of Workiva, as both its head of finance and as a user. And as head of the ESG task force, Klindt said she brings together the finance, ESG, and sustainability teams to ensure Workiva’s platform has all the necessary tools for customers.
Previously, ESG reporting “wasn't thought of as something that would need to be auditable,” Klindt explained. But now there are strict reporting requirements for specific regulations, such as Scope 3 emissions requirements in both California’s and the European Union’s regulations, as well as the European Sustainability Reporting Standards companies must follow as part of the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). The task force fosters necessary understanding across the relevant teams—the finance professionals learn “the data needs and the calculations…and why it’s important who we’re reporting to,” while the ESG and sustainability teams learn “about data sources…building a control environment, and building processes and procedures that can be audited,” Klindt said.
“That’s the whole point of the task force, is to not only create that synergy between these teams that haven't necessarily worked together that closely before…but also that connection between that integrated report—financial and non-financial data—living in harmony,” she said.
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ESG is a growing area of non-financial reporting that’s becoming prominent on financial and reporting teams. According to a Workiva survey of over 2,000 finance, sustainability, and risk professionals, nearly nine in 10 organizations are prioritizing ESG reporting more in 2024 than previous years. A January Deloitte survey of 300 executives at public companies with annual revenues of $500 million-plus found that more than half of organizations have formed a “cross-functional ESG working group” to review ESG reporting strategies, compared with just 21% of organizations in a similar survey in Q4 2021.
Governments at varying levels, from the EU to the state of California, are requiring companies to disclose certain climate information. The regs directly impact organizations operating in these regions, as well as organizations that work with the affected businesses, as CFO Brew previously detailed.
“If you want to do business in a global economy, you have to do this work,” Klindt said.
Jonathan Johnson, former CEO of Overstock.com and a board member of JM Smucker Co., said at the Amplify 2024 conference certain aspects of ESG reporting are becoming “table stakes.”
“The boards I sit on talk about, ‘how do we do what’s right for the planet, for our suppliers, for our consumers? A lot of our customers are demanding it,’” Johnson said. “So it’s more than just, ‘OK, we’ve got to check a box.’ It’s, ‘We want to do the right thing.’”
The same goes for Workiva, according to Klindt.
“We want to do this because of all the reasons that our customers want to,” Klindt said. “There's a lot of stakeholders that are interested in this data. We want to provide them [with] very valuable data. We're putting in place science-based targets that we need to track over time the progress that we're making, and we're reporting into different reporting agencies; we're putting our data into multiple frameworks.”