Every year, sustainability teams spend countless hours responding to ESG ratings, rankings, indices, awards, and assessments.
It’s fair to ask: is this effort worthwhile?
As someone who has spent years navigating these frameworks, my answer is: sometimes.
The business world has no shortage of sustainability badges, accolades, and scorecards. Some create more noise than value. Some incentivize disclosure over action. And some simply measure what is easy to measure rather than what truly matters.
But the best assessments do something much more important: they inspire and challenge companies to innovate
That’s why I have time for frameworks like the Dow Jones Best in Class Indices and independent evaluations such as Newsweek’s World’s Greenest Companies ranking.
At Logitech, we’ve just been recognized by both.
While I’m proud of that achievement, what interests me more is what these assessments can teach us.
Testing Transparency, Not Just Performance
The Dow Jones Sustainability Index reflects one of the broadest sustainability assessments in the world. It doesn’t just ask about carbon emissions. It examines governance, supply chain management, human rights, product stewardship, environmental management systems, climate, water, and much more. The process forces companies to look holistically at how sustainability is embedded across the business.
What I particularly value is that the assessment is conducted independently. Analysts review public disclosures and evidence without allowing companies to fill gaps through presentations or additional explanation. In many ways, it tests transparency as much as performance. When we identify a gap, it’s often a useful insight.
Do these recognitions help safeguard the planet?
No.
Funnily enough, the planet doesn’t care how many awards we win.
Designing for Real Impact
We build hardware for real people. Our devices sit on desks and in your hands every day and that simple fact carries profound responsibility – one that shapes how we approach our shared environment and how we design what we introduce into it.
Rethinking traditional technology design and manufacturing is a complex challenge. That said, these recognitions reinforce what we see internally: that our core practice of Designing for Sustainability is helping reduce impact across our operations and value chain, while our culture of transparency is helping us learn, share, and differentiate.
The best assessments provide more than recognition. They reveal blind spots, show where expectations are evolving, and help investors, customers, employees, and other stakeholders distinguish between talk and action.
And I’m supportive of making more sustainable companies and practices more visible. That’s one of the ways we shift the norm, accelerate progress, and encourage the sharing of ideas and leadership across industry. I’m also conscious of the business value of some of these awards – in terms of attracting investors, thought leaders, talent and potential partners. It all helps prove value – we need to make more sustainable practices a welcome part of business norms.
There’s enormous value in the questions these assessments force us to ask ourselves:
Where are we pioneering? Where are we behind? What should we be doing differently? Which expectations are evolving faster than our own thinking?
Those are the questions that matter.
At its best, recognition reinforces progress made to date while challenging us to keep moving forward. Recognition isn’t a finish line. We’re looking for continuous improvement and pioneering ambition.
Our year-end ESG reports come out later this month. You can expect our usual transparency, along with an update on our (…allow me this one…) “award-winning” core practice of Designing for Sustainability.
