For brands, making sustainable progress is more impactful than striving for perfection.
When trying to achieve a completely zero-waste lifestyle, modern life can get complicated. It is, therefore, important to take small steps towards progress for making a significant positive change.
At first, many organizations treat digital accessibility as a box to check and run a scan of their website to obtain a list of accessibility errors and integrate a system to fix the errors and complete the work. Here’s when the problem arises: new barriers are introduced as experiences evolve, trapping teams in an expensive break/fix cycle. Due to this, they constantly backtracked to remediate emerging issues.
With all this, how can organizations pave a sustainable path to progress?
Read more: Ultimate Guide to Power Your Organization's Sustainable Digital Transformation
Acknowledging and Making Realistic Choices
Today, sustainable living has an admirable goal. However, it is important to acknowledge the benefits associated with certain choices, including - mindful consumption, monitoring water usage, and a low-waste lifestyle. Striking the right balance across aspiration and practicality and making consistent efforts towards sustainability, organizations can contribute to a broader positive impact.
Progress over perfection involves taking the first step toward digital accessibility and recognizing that progress is not always a straight line. The key is to keep moving forward. For digital accessibility, organizations need to educate and integrate a flexible mindset and work towards change.
To better understand the steps, teams need to implement a manageable and impactful accessibility practice. Regarding digital accessibility, progress over perfection is important for organizations. It enables them to focus on consistent improvement instead of racing toward unrealistic goals. With an actionable plan to help teams shift their processes and culture, organizations can create a lasting, meaningful change.
Read more: Climate Actions 2050: Setting a Competitive Path to Achieve Net-Zero Goals
Progressing with Digital Accessibility
For organizations working to reach a specific end goal, accessibility should not be set as the end goal. Instead of thinking about accessibility as an end goal, they need to set specific, incremental goals to make progress toward accessibility. These goals are likely to vary for every department. A marketing team’s goals can include implementing accessibility training for employees and documenting processes for video creation. Meanwhile, a human resources (HR) department could work towards ensuring job applications are accessible and establishing a process to share accessibility requirements prior to interviews.
With companies getting started with digital accessibility, one of the first steps is creating an accessibility statement that integrates at least two modern contact options and putting it as the footer of their website. It is equally important for organizations to acknowledge these messages and use the shared feedback to prioritize fixes.
Being mindful of their teammates’ capacity can further help make a stronger case. Incorporating accessibility checks into workflows can further help teach the team how to do the same. To further drive the adoption of accessibility across organizations, they need to champion the role and current maturity levels of every team.
Read more: Top Digital Business Transformation Trends for 2024 and Beyond
Embracing a Holistic Approach to Sustainability
One of the biggest threats to embracing sustainability is the impossible idea of perfection. It fuels judgment and a level of scrutiny that is not productive and needs to stop. This negativity surrounding sustainability often comes from shared hopes for people and the planet. To tackle them, organizations need to work together and celebrate progress before perfection. It is important to critically analyze the efforts and make improvements if required.
However, there is a difference between being constructive and persistent, demoralizing negativity. This not only discourages people from trying sustainable practices but also causes them to fear doing something wrong. They need to integrate collective action and tackle the issues, but perfectionism often prevents progress.
Holistic sustainability emphasizes gradual progress and inclusivity. It highlights the importance of collective efforts. Holistic sustainability helps in creating a balanced and integrated approach to sustainable living and resource management.
Read more: Making an Impact: Top Business Sustainability Goals for 2024
Achieving Sustainable Progress with an Agile Approach
Digital accessibility is an ongoing practice. By committing to consistent learning and improvement rather than immediate perfection, organizations can keep sustaining the existing momentum. Embracing progress over perfection is one of the critical pillars of agile accessibility. This approach will enable teams to proactively incorporate accessibility across digital experience creation and continually iterate on their success. Getting started with agile accessibility and identifying small steps toward long-term goals will help integrate sustainable inclusion across every process within the organization.
A leader in ESG Services, SG Analytics offers bespoke sustainability consulting services and research support for informed decision-making. Contact us today if you are in search of an efficient ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) integration and management solution provider to boost your sustainable performance.
About SG Analytics
SG Analytics (SGA) is an industry-leading global data solutions firm providing data-centric research and contextual analytics services to its clients, including Fortune 500 companies, across BFSI, Technology, Media & Entertainment, and Healthcare sectors. Established in 2007, SG Analytics is a Great Place to Work® (GPTW) certified company with a team of over 1200 employees and a presence across the U.S.A., the UK, Switzerland, Poland, and India.
Apart from being recognized by reputed firms such as Gartner, Everest Group, and ISG, SGA has been featured in the elite Deloitte Technology Fast 50 India 2023 and APAC 2024 High Growth Companies by the Financial Times & Statista.
