There’s a conversation happening in procurement offices across Europe right now, and most mid-size companies aren’t ready for it.
Enterprise businesses (the large ones with complex supply chains and mandatory CSRD reporting obligations) are sending ESG questionnaires to their suppliers. They’re asking vendors, subcontractors, and service providers to document their sustainability practices. And buried in those questionnaires, almost every time, is a question that catches people off guard:
What structured sustainability programs do you run for your employees, and what evidence of participation can you provide?
For most mid-size companies, this question lands somewhere between uncomfortable and unanswerable.
Not because they don’t care about sustainability. Most do. But caring and having a documented, structured program with measurable participation are two different things. And right now, the difference between the two is starting to cost companies commercially.
Why is this happening
The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) came into force for large EU companies reporting on FY2024 data. What many businesses underestimate is that CSRD doesn’t just affect the companies directly in scope. It creates a cascade effect down the supply chain.
To meet their own reporting requirements, large enterprises need data from the companies they work with. That data includes information on how suppliers manage sustainability within their own workforces. Not just their emissions, but also their programs, culture, and demonstrable employee engagement.
The result is a new kind of commercial pressure that has nothing to do with sustainability conviction. It’s compliance pressure flowing downstream, arriving at the desks of operations directors and procurement managers at mid-size companies who never expected to be sustainability buyers.
The gap most companies don’t know they have
Here’s what we hear most often when we talk to mid-size companies: “We have a sustainability strategy. We just haven’t formalized anything at the employee level yet.”
That gap between having a strategy and having a mechanism to execute it with employees used to be invisible. No one asked to see inside it. Now they do.
What enterprise customers are looking for is evidence. Not intention. Not a policy PDF. Not a CSR page on your website. Evidence that your employees are actively involved in sustainability, that you can measure it, and that you can report on it.
That’s a completely different bar. And it’s one that requires a structured program, not a communication campaign.
What “evidence” actually means
When we talk to companies that have received these questionnaires, the ones that can answer them well tend to have the same things in common:
They ran a defined, time-bound sustainability program for their employees. They know exactly how many people participated, and what percentage of their workforce that represents. They have documented actions: what employees did, how many times, across which themes. And they have a report. An actual document they can share, attach to a questionnaire response, or present in a supplier review.
This isn’t about having the most sophisticated sustainability program. It’s about having something real and provable. A 4-week challenge with 65% employee participation and a PDF summary is a better answer to an ESG questionnaire than three years of good intentions.
The commercial reality
One unanswered questionnaire is an oversight. A pattern of incomplete responses is a risk signal. And in the current procurement environment, where sustainability performance is increasingly factored into supplier selection, contract renewal, and preferred vendor status, that risk signal has real consequences.
The companies we see acting on this fastest are those where the sustainability manager and the commercial director are having the same conversation. Where “we need to be able to answer these questionnaires” is as much a business development priority as it is a sustainability one.
EcoVadis scores affect insurance premiums, financing terms, and supplier tier classification. CDP responses feed into customer procurement scorecards. And increasingly, the employee engagement section of these assessments is where gaps appear, because it’s the section that requires a program, not just a policy.
The reframe that changes everything
For years, employee sustainability engagement has been sold as a culture play. Make your employees feel good about working for a company that cares. Improve retention. Build a purpose-driven employer brand.
Those things are real. But in the current market, they’re not enough to justify the budget. What justifies the budget is this: your largest customers will ask about your employee sustainability program. When they do, you need a real answer.
That’s not a sustainability argument. That’s a business continuity argument. And it’s one that lands very differently in a budget conversation.
Deedster at Work exists to close the gap between having a sustainability strategy and being able to prove that it’s reaching your employees. It produces the structured program, the participation data, and the documented evidence that turns “we care about sustainability” into “here’s what we do, here’s who was involved, and here’s what it produced.”
The question worth asking now
Before the next questionnaire arrives, it’s worth asking: if a key customer asked us today to describe our employee sustainability program and provide participation evidence, what would we send them?
If the answer is “nothing yet,” you still have time to change that. The companies that build this infrastructure now, before the pressure peaks, will be significantly better positioned than the ones scrambling to respond after the fact.
The window is open. But it’s not unlimited.
We built a 3-minute ESG readiness self-assessment that tells you exactly where you stand across the 8 questions enterprise customers and ESG ratings platforms are now asking suppliers.
Deedster at Work helps companies run structured, gamified sustainability programs for employees, producing documented participation, measurable behavioral change, and engagement reports you can use in customer questionnaires and ESG assessments. Used by 100+ companies, including AstraZeneca, Volvo, and Swiss Re, across 50 countries.
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