ESG: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

3 THE ESG ISSUES THAT MATTER MOST TO PEOPLE

by Daniel J. Benjamin, Ori Heffetz, and Michael M. Weinstein

For many corporate managers, improving their firms’ ESG performance is a central goal. To achieve it, they face trade-offs: Should they improve treatment of their workers, or instead reduce carbon emissions? Should they protect shareholders or the human rights of overseas workers?

To help them set priorities, decades of research—some of it by us—suggest a surprisingly underused approach to figuring out which corporate behaviors are most important to ordinary people: Ask them!

Their answers can be stated plainly. When asked to judge the overall behaviors of American firms, the public places outsized importance on the firms’ treatment ...