Plan to Build a Korean-Style Small and Medium-Sized Enterprise Integrated Management System that Includes ESG Management

Abstract

In the face of the recently worsening climate change crisis, the importance of non-financial values such as ESG is emerging. Under this trend, demands for ESG management from various stakeholders are continuously spreading throughout the industry. There is a need to introduce corporate ESG management, due to strengthening regulations by governments in each country and demands for ESG practice from institutional investors and customers. However, small and medium-sized enterprises still lack awareness of ESG management, and even if they are aware of it, it is very difficult to introduce ESG management in poor environments such as finances, human resources, and technology.

Accordingly, this study developed an ESG integrated management system to help small and medium-sized enterprises adopt ESG management. First, we analyzed the requirements structure and content of domestic and foreign standards (ISO 14001, ISO 50001, KS I 7001, ISO 26000, ISO 45001, ISO 27001, ISO 37001, ISO 37301, K-ESG Guidelines), and integrated the requirements in accordance with the HLS (High Level Structure) of ISO/IEC Annex SL. As a result, one type of ESG integrated manual and 12 types of work procedures for each field were developed, and a gap analysis of the developed ESG integrated manual was performed to verify that there were no omissions in the requirements of the applied standards. This integrated management system is expected to be very useful in introducing and operating ESG management along with existing management systems in small and medium-sized businesses. The developed ESG integrated management system is currently being applied and operated by K-Company. In the future, continued researches to verify the effectiveness of the ESG-integrated management system are needed.