Group management consists of the Managing Director, the CFO, the Communications and Investor Relations Manager and the heads of business areas. The Sustainability Council is responsible for the management of sustainability efforts. The Sustainability Council consists of the sustainability team, the Managing Director, the CFO, the Communications and Investor Relations Manager and the heads of business areas. The sustainability team comprises the Sustainability Manager and the Group’s sustainability controllers.
Handling sustainability issues
NIBE’s Board is ultimately responsible for ensuring that sustainabi-
lity efforts support the business strategy and comply with the requirements of authorities, shareholders and other stakeholders. The Board is also responsible for developing and monitoring the company’s strategies through policies, plans and objectives, decisions on acquisitions, major investments, appointments to managerial positions and the continual supervision of operations during the year. Policies must be reviewed and revised at least every 3 years or as needed.
The Sustainability Council regularly follows up outcomes, assesses risks, opportunities and due diligence and takes decisions on the continuing sustainability efforts. Much of the work is regulated in national legislation, such as environmental laws and labor law. In addition, NIBE is governed by voluntary commitments such as the OECD, the UN Global Compact and the UN Sustainable Development Goals/Agenda 2030.
The Sustainability Manager is responsible for the work at strategic level and reports on sustainability matters to the boards at Group and business area level in connection with strategy meetings and similar occasions.
The Group’s Sustainability Manager reports directly to the CEO and the Sustainability Council and suggests sustainability strategy and goals. In addition, the Sustainability Manager and the CFO provide information on the Group’s compliance with the company’s values, policies and guidelines. In order to ensure awareness of values and policies, all employees receive information on NIBE’s values in connection with onboarding. Values and all policies are also available on NIBE’s intranet. The values and most of the policies have been translated to many different languages to make them more easily available to employees and other stakeholders. The values and a large number of policies are also available on the website NIBE.com. The CEO together with senior management at each subsidiary are responsible for implementing both values and policies.
Evaluations
NIBE Group has well-established due diligence processes that integrate environmental and financial aspects in the mapping of new acquisitions. Processes are in place for suppliers, own operations and customers We are continuously working to improve and implement these processes.
Producing companies are evaluated on an ongoing basis by means of sustainability visits every few years. Sustainability visits are arranged in order of priority based on risk area, company size, etc., which means that return visits are sometimes prioritized before visits to newly acquired companies. At the time of writing, visits have been made to 78% of the production facilities of the companies covered by sustainability reporting. In addition to sustainability visits, the due diligence process also includes continuous sustainability reporting, energy mapping and communication with companies.
NIBE also takes into account international, national and/or regional legislation and regulations where trade sanctions have been introduced and affect sales, delivery and exports of NIBE products, services and technical data globally. This is set out in more detail in our Trade Compliance Policy, which among other things establishes when screening of cooperation partners is required.
Risk management
To minimize risks and ensure good internal control over sustainability reporting, NIBE uses a risk assessment method (NICS), which is described in more detail in GOV-1.
We have appointed managers responsible for each material area and are taking a systematic approach to the work based on a reporting standard to ensure understanding of the kind of data that should be collected. The information is collected via the Group’s reporting system Worldfavor. The sustainability team is responsible for ensuring the quality of the reported input data by means of various control measures.
To safeguard regulatory requirements and ensure that our reporting complies with current provisions, laws and regulations, we carry out reviews of legislation on a regular basis and receive support from specialists and lawyers with regard to interpretations and scope.
We use a template for the double materiality assessment and our process for evaluation of our material areas is well documented.