The Committed to CSR label, a stepping stone to CSR
AFNOR Certification has published a white paper explaining how obtaining CSR certification puts you in a good position to prepare the sustainability report required of companies under the European CSRD directive. Committed companies are already producing non-financial reports without even knowing it!
CSR and sustainability
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In 2025, companies with more than 250 employees will have to report on their non-financial performance with the same rigor as their financial performance: in the form of an annual report containing standardized indicators audited by an independent expert. This is the purpose of the CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive), which requires an initial report in 2025 on data from 2024.
The aim of such reporting is not so much to collect figures as to encourage those producing them to improve their practices and strategies on the major issues covered by these figures, namely ESG (environmental, social, and governance) topics. All this is done with the guarantee that the data is comparable from one year to the next and from one player to another, since the range of indicators required is standardized: the directive requires the use of the latest ESRS standards.
Committed to CSR: ESG data collection process already in place
Improving practices... This is something that appeals to companies already engaged in a CSR certification process. "The Engagé RSE label and the voluntary ISO 26000 standard on which it is based are clearly tools that facilitate sustainability reporting," says Mélodie Merenda, a specialist in the field for the AFNOR group. "Indeed, both involve processes for identifying, collecting, and reporting accurate CSR data on common thematic areas, with a dual materiality perspective."
The scoring approach specific to the Engagé RSE label supports the CSRD method in that it allows information relating to strategy, governance, the implementation of actions, and the measurement of results to be reported on a theme-by-theme basis. A new white paper from AFNOR Certification, available for free download here, formalizes these methodological and thematic bridges and provides CSR managers with the operational keys they need to prepare for sustainability reporting.
Also consider continuing education, so you don't find yourself backed into a corner: AFNOR Compétences is your partner here.
ISO 26000 guidelines | ESRS standards |
|---|---|
| Communities and local development | |
| Consumer-related questions | |
| Environment | |
| Fairness of practices | |
| Governance | |
| Human Rights | |
| Relationships and working conditions |
The document reveals a correspondence table between each of the ESRS standards and the seven chapters of ISO 26000, as well as the 50 criteria of the Engagé RSE label: a lot of groundwork has already been done! "The Engagé RSE label gives equal weight in the final score to the chapters measuring CSR performance and to the five other chapters assessing the company's CSR practices. This is precisely the purpose of the CSRD and ESRS standards: to encourage companies to set CSR objectives that are commensurate with today's challenges, to give themselves the means to achieve their ambitions, and to avoid any gap between strategy and results," it says.
The document will also be useful for SMEs: those that have chosen to adopt the Engagé RSE label are thus ahead of the curve, ready for the day when sustainability reporting will fully apply to them. For the time being, only listed SMEs are subject to this requirement, starting in 2027 for the 2026 financial year.
