Trends in Reporting

Corporate reporting has always been subject to shifting sands of fashion. But there are slow-burn global evolutions and faster-moving fads. By understanding trends you can see which ones you need to be baking in now for the long term.

Here are the 10 key reporting trends that we are seeing as maturing into ongoing expectation:

01 — No longer just a financial report

The annual report is no longer just for shareholders. It’s now a multi-stakeholder report that needs to appeal to broad range of audiences: your employees, prospective employees, customers seeking to reassure themselves of your ethics, regulators, environmental guardians – as well as investors. It’s a lay person’s document - a broad corporate statement of your total story, what you stand for, what’s important to you, how you're facing today’s many challenges, how you’re creating value.

This one shift in audience understanding moves a lot of goalposts. Content, structure, sequencing, language and design suddenly all require a major rethink.

02 — Integrated Reporting <IR>

No longer a trend, Integrated Reporting is now reporting BAU. The focus is on how everything impacts everything else. The aim of an integrated report is to explain the factors that affect your ability to create value over time for all your stakeholders.

<IR> is a mindset that takes time to implement fully. The key is getting started on the journey.

While now well embedded as a concept in New Zealand, we observe a great deal of lip service being paid to the robustness of the framework. As companies mature on their <IR> journey, some real depth should be becoming apparent, particularly in terms of risk identification and mitigation, trade-offs between outcomes for various capitals, and clarity around connectivity of thought and action across different parts of the business. Often we also observe a disconnect between this narrative and the central business strategy.

03 — Increasing burden of ESG

The onslaught of reporting add-ons (climate disclosures, TCFD, modern slavery etc) can mean that things become disjointed. They also have significant resource ramifications across your business.

One outcome has been the trend towards breaking these away as separate documents, mostly online only. And so, we are seeing a suite of reporting documents emerge, often considered outside centralised reporting planning and resulting in disconnected communication styles. It’s time to think of these as a planned set.

04 — Shorter reports

Counter-intuitively, given the additional reporting requirement, there’s a push for shorter page counts in the core report itself. Clearly this creates a real challenge, and to be successful, requires discipline, clarity, careful message structuring, and clear connectivity.

05 — Digital-first

Most companies are now putting online distribution of their reports first. This requires a total rethink of message sequencing, design and navigation. But it also allows much more immersive communication by adopting tools like in-page video.

06 — Telling your story

A move away from saying to showing. Connecting with audiences on both an emotional and rational level, helping them understand how you live your purpose and values. Case studies are a growing feature of reporting, showcasing real human outcomes from your actions. With this approach, the core of your corporate soul comes through, which leads to deeper engagement, higher belief levels, and the holy grail of ‘trust’.

Stakeholders are looking for organisations who act with purpose, working to make a difference beyond the numbers. The reporting process is a key vehicle for expressing the ‘why’ that’s driving your actions.

07 — Openness & transparency

Being equally honest about failings as well as achievements. Sharing some vulnerability openly shows your authenticity, which builds credibility and trust. Full disclosure of trade-offs – which of your input resources are depleted in order to grow others. Accessible language and writing style. Non-corporate. Jargon-light.

08 — Value Creation

Regardless of whether it’s an <IR > framework or not, many organisations are incorporating a ‘value creation model’ element. Here they highlight the inputs they rely upon to create value through their business model. On the flip-side, the model also identifies the outputs and outcomes their actions deliver – the value they create. The powerful side benefit to businesses who embark on articulating this is that it provides a really clear picture of what’s actually important in your organisation and paints a very stark picture of how everything impacts on everything else, encouraging joined-up thinking.

09 — Future focused

A focus on building a sustainable and resilient business model for the medium- and long-term, by managing the impacts on people, customers, the environment, the community and other factors. Often referred to a ‘pre-financial factors’, stakeholders are looking at how your actions today will impact your viability down the track.

10 — Perception Management

More companies are using their annual and sustainability reports as vehicles for getting their perspective across, influencing the narrative and to directly address misconceptions and misinformation.