How many people does a sustainability team need?
This will be the subject of an upcoming CSO Call for Sustainability Leaders members, with CSOs identifying insufficient headcount as the function’s leading internal barrier for the second year in a row, according to our Sustainability Planning Guide 2025.
With a rising workload increasingly affected by the evolving regulatory landscape, leaders are finding their teams are becoming increasingly stretched, with many sustainability professionals now unable to focus on all the projects on their plate. As the average sustainability team comprises seven full-time equivalents (FTEs), according to our research, compliance activities can quickly absorb employees’ time, creating a need for additional headcount.
To compound the challenge, CSOs typically struggle to hire more people to their teams. For the past three years, leaders responding to our planning survey have said they would like to expand their teams – but each year the data indicates they have been unable to do so. The research suggests that companies struggle to create the budget required to hire more FTEs.
Thinking about how to address this challenge reminds me of a conversation I had with Schneider Electric’s Xavier Denoly during last October’s World Sustainability Congress. He told me that, while the company’s corporate sustainability team is relatively small, thousands of employees in different functions are working to improve sustainability in some way.
While a number in the thousands might be a stretch for most organisations, embedding sustainability throughout the business is the only way most companies can meet their ESG goals. Even if our survey respondents had been able to secure the new hires they wanted, the work required to meet different environmental and social targets is such that a single team would struggle to fulfil it. Integration with other functions is essential.
Of course, integration is easier said than done and will take a lot of engagement work on the part of the sustainability team. For members seeking to do this, the learnings from one of our previous leadership calls on the topic offer some useful tips: create a cross-enterprise ESG network; develop KPIs for cross-functional engagement; and build a business case to include sustainability criteria in executive bonus schemes.
If you aren’t a Sustainability Leaders member, download our Sustainability Planning Primer 2025 to see our research on sustainability team sizes and structures.
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