Boost Your Sustainability Skills and Join This Year’s GRI Global Conference Master Classes

The GRI 2016 Global Conference in May will embrace the new era of sustainability with a focus on how non-financial information can help empower better decision making to create a more sustainable economy and world. It will feature innovative and inspiring stories by sustainability leaders who are creating transformational change. 

GRI is also working together with expert organizations to deliver interactive Master Classes that will build understanding and provide practical guidance on a variety of key sustainability and reporting challenges. These Master Classes are offered as additional extras to the dynamic three-day Conference program, and are designed to give you focused learning moments to enhance your Conference experience. With 14 different topics to choose from, ranging from materiality, human rights, due diligence, data, land access, public-private partnerships, stakeholder engagement and communicating sustainability performance, the Master Classes are a great source of knowledge in which to invest. 

Two of the experts who are facilitating a Master Class share their top tips for getting the most value from the Master Classes and the Conference:

“Working with clients in more than 90 countries, we’re exposed daily to the challenges that diverse, global organizations face when trying to report their sustainability position. GRI is at the core of how these clients overcome these challenges and importantly it’s the data that underpins reliable, transparent reports,” explains David Wynn from Greenstone. “We see the GRI Conference as the go-to global event for sustainability leaders to share and explore the latest trends in non-financial reporting. 

The focus of our Master Class will be exploring why is it important for reporting organizations to move beyond the sustainability report itself to ensure that decision makers have access to the high quality and reliable data they are increasingly demanding, and how can this best be achieved by organizations. The Master Class is designed as an interactive session providing the opportunity for attending delegates to share their own data management challenges and hear and learn from peers on the best way to overcome these. This is why the class has been designed with workshop sessions on presenting data for different audiences; routes to ensuring quality and reliability; and opening up sustainability data to different audiences.” 

GRI Conference Master Class: How to Breathe Life into your Sustainability Data 18 May 09:30-12:30.

“The GRI Conference is an excellent opportunity not only to understand future trends on sustainability, but also to network with professionals with whom we share similar challenges,” explains Emmanuel Perakis from STREAM Management. “Working for the last 17 years on both sustainability and management issues, I came to notice that sustainability professionals focus on familiarizing themselves with sustainability-related topics, however frequently neglect being up to date with (and apply) management techniques, which are broadly used across other business functions (e.g. excellence, marketing, human resources). It seems we are trying to re-invent the wheel within our ‘sustainability world’, while the wheel is just next door. 

The idea of our Master Class is to show some of these existing ‘wheels’, in order for participants to become better managers by managing sustainability in a more effective and efficient way. Therefore, we will familiarize participants on selected management techniques, and showcase how they can be used to manage sustainability-related topics (such as strategy development, materiality analysis, performance measurement, program deployment etc.), through theory, individual and team exercises, as well as case studies from organizations who apply them.

Psychologically we all have the tendency to attend conferences on topics we are most familiar with, however I believe that accumulating knowledge on issues we are least familiar is much more value adding. It’s a bit like going to the gym: exercising your strong body parts is easier (both physically and mentally), but exercising your weakest body parts is where improvement comes from.”

GRI Conference Master Class: Management Techniques to Handle Sustainability Effectively 20 May 14:30-17:30 

The three-hour Master Classes can be booked for an extra cost of €250 each. Secure your place with the early bird registration before 29 January and join 1,500 sustainability leaders at RAI Amsterdam from 18-20 May!