Making Progress: Client’s Concerns and Task Allocation

Project update: figuring out clients’ concerns and the reason for launching the project

Talking with clients directly in person or on zoom is a good way for us to understand our clients’ expectations, also helping us narrow down the topics. After the second client meeting, we realized that “no communications between investors and ESG framework service providers” is what our client concerns about and the reason for starting this project. According to the KPMG report, in the U.S., the SASB is the most popular reporting standard - there are 75% of N100 companies using it. In contrast, GRI is the leading reporting standard in the EU, and the Stock exchange is popular in South Africa, Malaysia, India, Singapore, and Taiwan where the percentage of N100 companies reporting against stock exchange guidelines exceeds 90%. Why is the SASB more popular in the U.S. than others? What’s the difference between SASB and other standards like GRI and TCFD? And, how to improve one ESG framework and make more investors use it? All these questions are what we want to discuss in our project.

Furthermore, according to Morgan Stanley’s report, there is a large gap on adopting ESG into investing decisions between asset managers and asset owners. Asset owners are more likely to take ESG into consideration when evaluating sustainable investing. For example, over 85% of asset owners would like to look at the ESG reporting and disclosure as well as firm-level ESG or sustainable investing policy when making their investing decisions. However, less asset managers apply ESG characteristics to their sustainable investing practices or strategies, such as “ESG reporting and disclosure”, “Have a dedicated ESG team/resources”, “Investor communication on sustainability outcomes”, and “Firm-level ESG or sustainable investing policy”. In this process, asset managers can change their investing strategies based on asset owners’ requirements. However, ESG framework providers do not know why asset managers are less likely to apply their ESG frameworks into the decision-making process. No communication is the key issue our project wants to solve, which is also one of the reasons for the divergence of ESG ratings and rankings. Therefore, interviewing investors and exploring the reasons becomes one of our important goals.

Teamwork: task allocation

At the first internal meeting, the roles of each team member have already been decided, including project manager, qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis, and client communications. However, after the second client meeting, our work scope and final deliverables are clearer, we also realized that there is no data for us conducting quantitative analysis. Therefore, quantitative analysis is replaced by academia reaching out. Like what I mentioned in the first blog, crowdsourcing in the class is a way to expand our network. Besides interviewing investors, reaching out to professors who are studying ESG is mentioned by our client, which also gives us the chance to collect more suggestions on our project. 

In the second phase of our project, allocating tasks becomes another difficulty for us. Although we have different roles in the team, most of the tasks need more than one person. Therefore, how to make sure our team’s workload is divided fairly and effectively is important.

First, the project manager can take the lead in allocating tasks to team members. Our project manager split the task into four different parts, including initial preparation such as investor segmentation and academic research, interview work for the first category investors (individual and institutional asset owners), interview work for the second category investors (asset managers), interview work for the third category investors (service providers), and conclusion. The first four parts need two persons each, and the conclusion needs help from all group members. Therefore, based on what we did in the initial literature review and preferences shown in our internal discussions, our project manager assigns these tasks to all of us and makes sure that we have different partners in different tasks. This is a good way to allocate takes. Also, deciding the tasks in the internal meetings and asking group members preferences can be another way for task management. Importantly, working with different partners would improve team cohesion, also helping us work effectively as a whole.

Second, although only two of us are responsible for one task, the rest of group members also need to participate in it. For example, after completing the questionnaires, members who didn’t take part in it can check the questionnaires, providing their suggestions or confusions about it. In this way, all of the group members can know the process of our project and make sure all the tasks can be completed effectively while avoiding omissions.

Third, the midterm-preparation meeting can help us deliver the presentation smoothly before clients. Our team met before the midterm presentation in order to figure out the logical flow of our slides and who is responsible for which slides. As a team, all of our group members participated in this presentation, choosing the slides based on the work we did and preferences. Meanwhile, each of us tried to present in this internal meeting, which helps us find a better way to present and see if there are any changes required, such as how to make our slides more visualized and clear, what’s the focus of our literature review, and what kind of findings our clients may not know.