Business Ethics and Sustainability

If a company wants to be considered as a sustainable company, they must integrate their sustainability throughout the organization. Daily activities will be affected achieve this. Alignment of strategy, structure and management systems are important to coordinate sustainability because of the followings (Marc J. Epstein):

1- Senior management should be committed to build a sustainability strategy.

2- Management needs to be committed for the decisions the make in the organization

3- The structure of the organization and the various business & functional units should support sustainability and if there is any new department is needed to achieve sustainability.

4- All these factors above have to be integrated together to help encouraging employees to achieve sustainability since each one alone can not help in this regard.

CASE2

Strategic alignment helps organizations, including small businesses, define what matters most to the organization and then create a road map to achieving the organization’s purpose. Strategic alignment requires planning, a willingness to reassess and make adjustments regularly and a workforce that feels involved and responsible for the organization achieving its objectives.

Planning

Before the leaders of an organization can begin a strategic alignment of the organization, they must first take an honest look at the state of the organization. These leaders must decide what the goal of the organization should be, and then set objectives that will help the organization realize the goal. For example, a car company may have a goal of increasing market share, but the objectives to achieve this goal might include increasing vehicle fuel efficiency, reigning in production costs and improving buyers’ perceptions of the brand — objectives that don’t directly support the goal. If the organization’s leaders are not honest in their assessment of the organization, the strategic alignment is flawed from the beginning.

Organizational Unity

Strategic alignment helps an organization work cohesively. Organizations have members who operate in different capacities, functioning in different departments or divisions. What one person in the organization does in one department or division affects the activities of others in the same or different departments or divisions. Strategic alignment coordinates everyone’s activities so the organization as a whole works toward the same goals using prescribed processes. Employees stop reacting to situations and begin acting proactively to move the organization toward its goals.

Resource Use

How an organization makes use of resources will help determine the success or failure of the organization. Employee time is not unlimited, so strategic alignment will give employees direction and a vision of what matters most in the organization so they spend their time on activities that promote objectives instead of focusing exclusively on their own goals. Members of the organization also become more mindful of using other resources to accomplish strategic goals.

Reporting

Part of the strategic alignment process involves members of the organization giving regular reports on progress made toward the organization’s goals. These regular progress reports also focus on the methods used to achieve goals, allowing superiors to help subordinates adjust their activities before any problems become larger and harder to correct. Knowing that they must report their activity and progress toward goals, members of the organization feel more urgency to perform well.

Adjustments

An organization’s strategic alignment should not remain static, but should be fluid and evolve over time. The circumstances in which the organization finds itself, including the environment in which the organization functions, changes over time and affects how the organization can and should function. The organization also should assess its strategies and achievement of goals periodically, making adjustments as needed. An organization may also realize that better ways of operating exist and the organization begins to adopt and implement these more effective practices.

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Case 1

For a company to be sufficiently sustainable, integration of the sustainability must be done throughout the company. As expected, this will affect the daily routine activities of the company. The following should be used to determine and ensure that the company is sustainable.

Employee sustainability – in every organization, employees are the biggest assets and if the company administration acquires and efficiently maintains sustainable employees, the company will be sustainable.

The society/community/ethno sphere – the company……………..

APA

362 Words