EFQM Sustainability Builder

Sustainability ● Managed ● Assessed

In today’s business environment of limited resources, the knowledge and understanding of topics like "Corporate Responsibility" and "Sustainability" becomes particularly imperative in order to respond to new challenges.

To facilitate Excellence in Sustainability, the EFQM launched the Sustainability Excellence Builder, developed in partnership with STREAM, which aims to help professionals and organisations to:

  • Understand emerging sustainability challenges and build internal capabilities to manage Sustainability.
  • Measure quantitatively and assess objectively their actual Sustainability maturity level.
  • Benchmark and share knowledge with other organisations to become more sustainable.


The Sustainability Excellence Builder is designed around three components  which support an organisation in its journey towards Excellence in Sustainability in a structured and systematic way. The aim is to develop their in-house, long-term capacity to manage Sustainability issues (rather than outsource these activities), by providing respective knowledge, offering required implementation tools  and facilitating knowledge sharing among peer organisations.

Knowledge Component:
Aims to present emerging sustainability challenges and build internal capabilities to manage Sustainability, and includes among other:

Sustainability Management Training (SMT): A 2-day course designed for professionals that require an understanding of how to practically take responsibility for a sustainable future, by managing the topic of Sustainability in a systematic way and handle the required change internally.

  • Content is structured around 14 systematic Change Management steps and covers all 7 main Sustainability areas (Management, Owners, Employees, Customers, Suppliers, Community, Environment).
  • The course is highly interactive, in small teams (maximum number of participants is 12), includes team workshops, individual exercises, best practices from leading organisations, case studies, videos examples etc.
  • Upon successful completion, participants receive a Certificate of successful completion as “Sustainability Management Professional” by the EFQM.


Sustainability Assessment Training (SAT): A 2-day course designed for professionals who want to be able to assess objectively according to the Committed to Sustainability framework.

  • The course is highly interactive, in very small teams (maximum number of participants is 8), includes team workshops and personalised individual feedback.
  • Content is based on a Case Study, which has been adapted from a real submission document, to simulate the real type of information an assessor would need to assess.
  • Upon successful completion, participants will receive a Certificate of successful completion as “Sustainability Assessors” by the EFQM and could be registered as formal Sustainability Assessors of the EFQM.


Sustainability eLearning (SeL): A 45-60 minute on-line e-learning awareness course helps employees of an organisation to increase their awareness, facilitates their thinking process and changes their behaviour related to Sustainability.

  • Content is structured around 7 easily understandable Areas (Management, Owners, Employees, Suppliers, Customers, Communities, Environment), addressing realistic, practical work related case studies, to drive change in day to day behaviour.
  • The course uses characters, audios and animations to ensure a user friendly experience, is based on how correct answers are to given dilemmas (rather than right or wrong) to facilitate employees’ thinking and provides feedback per overall results, question and correctness of answers to facilitate learning.


Assessment Component:
Aims to measure quantitatively and assess objectively an organisation's actual Sustainability maturity level, and includes among other:

Sustainability Assessment Tool (SAT): An on-line tool, which enables an organisation to quantitatively assess and graphically represent its current sustainability level based on its policies, processes, performances and perception results. This enables an organisation to take strategic decisions on which areas to focus on, tactical decisions on which sub-areas to improve, as well as utilize a tailor made pool of suggested improvements to easily develop a 3-5 year action plan.

  • Displays over 1,000 clearly stated questions structured around the RADAR logic, without however requiring any prior expertise for completion.
  • Provides a tailor made pool of suggested next actions (across all 7 Areas and 41 sub-Areas) on how to improve your sustainability level, in order to easily develop a 3-5 year action plan.
  • The tool is structured around 7 easily understandable Areas (Management, Owners, Employees, Suppliers, Customers, Communities, Environment) and 41 sub-Areas, across Policies, Processes, Performance Results and Perception Results.

Committed to Sustainability Assessment Tool (C2ST): Access to an excel based assessment tool, which gives an organisation the ability to perform a sanity check vs. building blocks of sustainability as described in the C2S Framework.

  • Management: understanding the organisation's sustainability strategy, how it is integrated in the existing management practices.
  • Employees: how responsibly employees are managed in order to create a sustainable work environment.
  • Environment & Community: how organisations manage their environmental impact and positively contribute to the wider society.
  • Owners & Partners: how responsibly the organisation interacts with owners and partners, in order to ensure a sustainable business result.
  • Customers: analysing how responsibly customers are treated in order to create a sustainable relationship.


Benchmarking Component:
Aims to benchmark and share knowledge with other organizations to become more sustainable, and includes among other:

Data Collection Tool (DCT): An on-line tool to gather data required to understand an organisation's bottom line Sustainability related results, compare with peer organisations and populate the organisation's Sustainability Report, in a user friendly and secure way.

  • Addresses all issues related to sustainability structured around 7 Areas (Management, Owners, Employees, Suppliers, Customers, Community, Environment) and 50 sub-Areas.
  • Provides a pool of over 1,500 indicators to choose from, as well as the option to add new organization specific indicators, all of which can easily be assigned to single users.
  • Enables each user to register data, attach documents, add clarifications and easily monitor pending fields on a single screen, as well as easily review not completed indicators to follow up through automated reminders.


Participation is on a first come-first serve basis, till maximum number of participants is registered; it is therefore strongly advised to confirm your participation as soon as possible.


For further information and participation, please contact us.