Why sustainability needs to be embedded, not siloed

Over the past few years, many companies that built sustainability teams in the previous decade have rethought and stepped back.

It is easy to read that as a retreat, proof that sustainability commitments were negotiable all along. In most cases, however, that's the wrong takeaway.

What looks like abandonment is closer to redesign: a shift from sustainability as a separate function, owned by a small team with a title, to sustainability as a shared responsibility distributed across governance, risk and operations.

This pattern shows up across sectors, suggesting a broader rethink of where accountability should sit.

The pressure behind this shift is real, and it is not going away.

Regulatory expectations are shifting faster than any single annual reporting cycle can absorb. They increasingly differ by jurisdiction, forcing global enterprises to build systems rather than one-off responses.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) is expanding both governance questions and the environmental footprint companies must account for. And investors, customers and employees increasingly judge sustainability commitments by how a company operates day to day, not by what appears in an annual report.

Together, these forces are pushing sustainability out of its silo and into the machinery a company already uses to run itself: strategy, risk management and governance.

That push creates a real risk. Dissolving a sustainability team does not automatically distribute its responsibilities. It can just as easily create a gap, where metrics are still tracked, but nobody is clearly accountable for the outcomes behind them.

The failure mode is not fewer sustainability titles on an organizational chart. It is diffusion without design: responsibility scattered widely enough that no single function, committee, or leader is positioned to own it, and progress stalls quietly while everyone assumes someone else is in charge.

Avoiding that gap takes deliberate design, not good intentions.

In practice, that means sustainability oversight matching its governance cadence to other business-critical topics, rather than being reviewed once a year and set aside. It means folding sustainability-related risks directly into enterprise risk management. Integrating regulatory exposure, technology risk and strategic planning, instead of tracking them on a separate report that senior leaders may never open.

It means building cross-functional structures with clearly assigned ownership, so accountability does not default to whichever team happens to inherit it. And for some companies, it means tying leadership incentives to sustainability outcomes, so accountability carries real weight.

Take my company, Genesys, as an example. Its sustainability team sets strategy and FY31 goals aligned to three pillars: planet, people and performance. Accountability for delivering against these goals does not sit with that team alone.

The company's board holds dedicated sustainability sessions at least once a year. Additionally, briefings on initiatives, metrics and emerging issues are being held quarterly – this is the same cadence used for other matters the board considers business critical.

Genesys’s enterprise risk management programme, overseen by cross-functional stakeholders and the executive team, treats sustainability commitments as risks to be assessed alongside AI transformation and regulatory change, not as a separate workstream.

The company has also applied similar thinking to how it governs AI: a cross-functional AI ethics board, drawing from engineering, research and development, and product teams, holds clear ownership of AI principles and compliance, rather than leaving those questions to whichever team ships the feature.

This is not the only model, nor is it a finished destination. Every company will embed sustainability differently based on its size, sector, maturity and risk profile.

What matters is the underlying architecture to the company’s sustainability efforts: Central expertise remains strong, business owners are clearly accountable and governance provides visibility before problems become performance failures.

A few questions can help any leader test whether embedding is real or just rhetorical:

These are questions companies cannot fully answer alone. Supply chains, industry standards and regulatory frameworks are shared infrastructure, which is why forums that bring competitors, regulators and civil society to the same table matter: they let companies compare how they are distributing accountability, not just what targets they have set.

As more companies restructure how they manage sustainability, the question worth asking is not who owns it. It is whether accountability was actually designed in, or just assumed to survive the next reorganization on its own.