Once you’ve completed your new member welcome & onboarding (step 1) we’ll complete a custom company evaluation and prioritization in your first month of membership. This evaluation is based on our proprietary company rating criteria and is used to identify strengths and weaknesses that will define where your company has opportunities to improve performance. These opportunities should be considered in the specific context of your company and your individual professional development needs to determine which ones to prioritize. Prioritization will help ensure that you get maximum value from your Hilde professional membership.

Now that we have a comprehensive look at the issues that your company COULD address, we’ll want to focus on which ones you SHOULD address through your limited time and resources. In other words, we want to answer the following questions:

Which issues are the ones I should prioritize for improving company performance?

We recommend looking at a number of factors related to the specific context of your company to answer this question. Those factors likely should include considering the current and planned strategic direction of the company (i.e. geographic expansion, launching new product categories), customer and employee perceptions (i.e. your customers really care about climate), existence of internal champions (i.e. the CMO is passionate about ingredient safety), and resource considerations (i.e. your budget). We’ll help you think through how best to consider company context as a factor in setting priorities.

Which issues should I prioritize so I can continue to grow professionally?

Your priorities should also be defined by your individual professional learning and development objectives, not just what the company needs. Sometimes these will overlap. Sometimes they won’t. But we believe it’s up to you to ensure that you grow in ways that will serve you in your current role and any future roles you hope to find. Your priorities should be an appropriate mix of company needs and individual professional needs.

The areas of impact (e.g. ingredient safety, climate, packaging waste, worker fairness, etc.) that you’ve identified as priorities either for your company or for yourself should be your focus for how you use Hilde moving forward. For example, you’ll find action-oriented content designed to help you determine how to move the needle on these priorities in our member-only articles and reports. You’ll also be able to ask detailed questions and get expert guidance during our ethical business Q&A sessions and topic-specific workshops.

The final part of this step includes using your priorities as the basis for internal company sustainability strategy and performance measurement. That can include different approaches and take a variety of forms. For example, if you already have an existing sustainability strategy then the prioritization work we’ve done can help validate your current efforts or highlight potential pivots that make sense. In cases where no existing sustainability strategy exists, our prioritization can serve as the basis for a new one. That may be something that you use purely on your own but could have much more value if it is adopted more broadly. If your goal is to build a strategy and measures of success that are adopted across the company, there are some specific steps (i.e. stakeholder engagement) you’ll want to take to increase your likelihood of success. We’ll help you plan it.

In step 3 you’ll focus on driving action through the Hilde platform on these strategic priorities. You’ll have the opportunity to dig in deeper on how to navigate complex internal stakeholder dynamics and influence decision-making.