Symbio faced a challenge common to scaling tech businesses: ESG had become a material consideration for customers, investors, regulators, and staff — but the organisation lacked a structured framework that articulated what those commitments were and how they would be delivered.
Five stakeholder groups with legitimately different priorities made the problem harder. Customers cared about supply chain resilience and data security. Investors wanted transparency and measurable commitments. Staff wanted genuine people and community investment. The board needed regulatory alignment. A framework that served all five could not be built by asking only one.
Beyond stakeholder complexity, there was a harder design challenge: how do you take a broad, contested concept like ESG and structure it into something both genuinely comprehensive and sufficiently focused to be actionable?
My ownership sat primarily in the research layer — designing the methodology for and conducting the materiality assessment that would form the evidentiary foundation of the framework. ESG frameworks fail most often not because companies lack good intentions, but because they are built from the inside out, reflecting what leadership wants to say rather than what stakeholders need to hear.
The materiality assessment engaged five distinct stakeholder groups through structured interviews, surveys, and workshops. Findings were synthesised across all five groups to surface where priorities aligned, where they diverged, and which topics carried the highest combined materiality weight.
The framework was aligned to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and the SASB IT Services Sector reporting standards — ensuring the structure could hold up to external scrutiny, not just internal approval. Conclusions were presented to leadership and the board before the framework moved to publication.
The framework was not just approved internally — it was published for external stakeholder audiences, signalling that Symbio was willing to be held accountable to its commitments.
Built around three pillars — Resilient Operations and Supply Chains (Environment), Empowered People and Communities (Social), and Secure and Transparent Systems (Governance) — the architecture was designed to be both comprehensive and actionable.
When Aussie Broadband (ASX:ABB) acquired Symbio, the framework was formally adopted as part of the combined entity's ESG approach.
The materiality assessment is what separates a credible framework from a generic one. Starting with structured stakeholder research — before any architecture decisions — meant the framework reflected actual priorities rather than internal assumptions about what those priorities should be.
Five groups with legitimately different priorities isn't a problem to solve before the work starts — it's the core input that shapes the structure. The tension between what investors need and what staff need, for example, is precisely what forces a framework to be both rigorous and human.
Deciding what ESG means for a telco-technology company is as important as the content itself. Without deliberate scope definition, frameworks sprawl into everything and commit to nothing. The three-pillar architecture was as much a scoping decision as it was a structural one.
Alex manages a portfolio that includes technology and telecommunications holdings. ESG criteria have moved from a secondary filter to a primary screen — not for ethical reasons alone, but because ESG risk is increasingly correlated with financial risk. Alex reads sustainability reports and ESG frameworks regularly and has a finely tuned sense of what genuine commitment looks like versus what has been written for optics. Greenwashing is the thing Alex is most alert to.