The Beginning of Teamwork: How to Collaborate with Others?

About the project:

Because of the Effective Management course, I knew ESG and impact investing, also realizing that no global and common metrics to measure impacts has become one of the biggest issues in sustainable investing. This is the beginning of my “ESG trip”, and also the issue I’d like to figure out. Meanwhile, The “Subjective and inconsistent” ratings on ESG also bothers our client who initiates the project focusing on ESG ratings and rankings.

How to evaluate companies’ environmental, social, and governance performances? How do investors make their investing decisions by taking ESG ratings into consideration? ESG ratings and rankings play an important role in it. However, there are more than “40 ESG ratings, 150 ESG rankings and 450 ESG indices”, according to the Reporting Exchange platform of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. Among these rankings and ratings, GRI reporting, as a leader in sustainability reporting, provides performance indicators in different categories, such as materials, energy, water, and biodiversity. SASB standards cover five sustainability dimensions, including environment, social capital, human capital, business model and innovation, and leadership and governance. ISSB and TCFD standards also provide guidance for all businesses. By reading all these ESG standards, it’s obvious that they have some common metrics such as carbon emissions, carbon footprint, and clean tech. Therefore, researching on the relationship and differences of different ESG standards would be the first step of our project.

Teamwork: Schedule the first meeting with the client

The first difficulty our team met was “Finding a common time”. Although we are a small group having just 4 people, because of different classes and schedules during the weekdays, finding a meeting time that works for everyone is also hard for us. In order to start the first meeting with our client as soon as possible, we finally decided to let our client choose the meeting time; even if all of our four members couldn’t meet together during that time, sharing notes and follow-up email are the solutions to keep us on the same page. 

Besides, preparing for the first meeting with our client is necessary and important to make this upcoming meeting effective and make the project clear for us. Therefore, there are several things we have done during our team meeting in the class time.

First, we discussed a lot about the project description, which includes several terminologies we were not sure of their meanings even after our research on google. This is important to point out and obtain a clear understanding during the first client meeting. Meanwhile, one of our group members also mentioned the relationship between the first question and the other two questions. It seems like there is no direct association between them, which could be one of the questions we would ask during the client meeting.

Second, researching before the client meeting is important to build our own understanding of this project. This is also mentioned by other groups. During the class discussion, another project group
member who hadn’t received the client reply already started their research to get a deeper understanding of their project, which can be sent to the client to get their feedback. Therefore, our group also read some ESG standard framework articles and wrote down all our questions that we would ask the client during the first meeting. Researching before the first meeting not only shows our enthusiasm and responsibility for this project, but also makes this meeting more effective.

Third, clarifying roles and responsibilities within the team and settling on a meeting time with the client are also important topics of our first discussion. According to the project description, we decided our responsibilities, including i) project manager who would develop timeline, maintain deadlines, and organize team meetings; ii) quantitative analysis; iii) qualitative analysis; iv) notes making; v) client communications including emailing clients; and vi) formatting, editing and reviewing our reports and mid-term and final slides. Moreover, weekly meetings are ideal for us since at the beginning of the project, we’d like to figure out our project scope and deliverable; weekly meetings give us more opportunities to talk with our client. This would be determined after the discussion with our client.

Collaborating with classmates is another thing that make me realize the importance of networking. As a student consultant, we are now not experts in ESG standards. But, we have our classmates to help us find professors or alumni working in this field. This is also the topic of our next team meetings: finding experts in ESG standards.