As a CSR consultant based in London, I was assigned ZaTech as one of my projects and requested to develop a CSR corporate plan for ZaTech. As a result, utilising the insights gained from the coursework, I’ll create a CSR Corporate Plan for ZaTech that will help ZaTech overcome its dilemma of whether it should donate 50% of its profits to charities or focus on producing as much money as possible.
The corporate social responsibility (CSR) basically suggests a corporate or business strategy for business in a responsible and socially responsible manner (Saeed et al., 2021). To begin with, the goal of forming an enterprise is to assure that the value arising from ZaTech could be realised within a long haul; but, when a business ignores the demands of the community and works solely on financial gain, its long-term existence cannot be assured. As a result, corporate organisations make use of societal resources (human capital, natural resources, and so on.) to grow their profits (Calero et al., 2019). As a result, it is ZaTech’s obligation to give back those revenues as a contribution to the betterment of the community as a whole.
Businesses that do not follow CSR policies are nonetheless putting themselves at risk. The risks include damaging one’s brand image, finding it harder to recruit and retain staff, and the possibility of more regulation. Inability to adopt Corporate social responsibilities can also have a negative influence on a company’s sustainable viability, constraining accessibility of capital, overlooking expansion opportunities, and failing to separate a firm’s brand from the competition. As a result, becoming socially accountable is no longer a viable option; it is fundamentally how smart the businesses can work. Viz, following are the key sustainability challenges in lack of CSR that a firm faces:
There are other factors that can hamper the sustainability of an organisation like ZaTech, like lack of occupational integration, lack of gender equality, lack of corporate governance, lack of measures and strategies to prevent corruption, causing damage to the environment, lack of social and human rights, and lack of proper working conditions within the workplace.
Individuals support a variety of businesses for a variety of reasons, one of which is their CSR strategy. A corporate social sustainability plan, in my perspective, illustrates that a company is compassionate and appreciates all individuals, particularly employees (Tworzydo et al., 2021). Therefore, ZaTech that is committed to making the world a better environment is more likely to hire qualified employees. This highlights how important social responsibilities are to employees (Vishwakarma, 2019). Employees gain from CSR initiatives since they help to create a more productive and helpful workplace environment.
The importance of CSR to corporations and respective commercial operations cannot be overstated. The scope and form of CSR advantages for a company differ according to the type of business. Risk management is one essential aspect of every corporate strategy; the brand image developed over years could be damaged by revelations of malfeasance, threats to the environment, and other issues, attracting false allegations and regulatory agencies (Westin & Parmler, 2020). In order to prevent losing goodwill, it is critical to perform responsibly and take the correct approach. Furthermore, it aids in the development of the market and customer base by prescribing particular ethical ideals that aid in the development of brand reputation. Companies can however reduce expenditures by implementing environmentally sustainable practices while manufacturing commodities and performing operational duties.
ZaTech wishes to become the industry leaders by working hands-in-hands with ethical and moral practices, for with ZaTech will:
ZaTech’s key CSR beliefs motivate ZaTech to conduct successful initiatives and make a good influence on humanity. ZaTech is a viable option.
The overall approach of CSR that shall be implemented in the organisation, namely ZaTech, is an “Ethical Approach”. Ethics refers to the anticipated behavioural patterns, conventions, and ideals that occur both within and without an organisation. Eventually ethical CSR would emerge to demonstrate that suppliers, consumers, staff, and, of course, the community aka society at large, all have a stake in the outcome. It will be more than a trend or a promotional campaign aimed at increasing profits; it’d be a chosen lifestyle. Rather the stakeholders of ZaTech will collectively benefit from this “Ethical Approach” to implementation of the CSR.
Well different stakeholders in a company seek different interests from a company. Thus, following are the ways in which CSR is not just important to the firm, but also to its stakeholders, and this is how they’ll benefit from the same:
These 3 pillars that characterise environmental sustainability are usually depicted in a graphic to help people comprehend the concerns and how they relate to one another.
Figure 1: Three Pillars of Sustainability
The purpose of sustainable development is to “establish and preserve environments wherein mankind as well as the environment may coexist in mutual peace (Purvis et al., 2019), allowing present and prospective generations to meet their economic, ecological, and other needs.”
So, sustainable strategies must be taken into account by ZaTech the underlying interactions underlying behaviours that influence the economy, society and environment. If ZaTech only achieve two of the three sustainability pillars, ZaTech will be able to:
5.1 Strategy 1: Implementing a Corporate Governance and Risk Management plan to Resolve Conflict of Interest among the stakeholders
Many companies assume they’re on a stable foundation when it comes to the sustainability pillar of the economy. ZaTech must be profitable in order to be sustainable in the long run. Profits, on the other hand, are unable to surmount the remaining two pillars. In reality, the economic pillar isn’t about producing money in the first place. The economic dimension include operations such as effective governance, compliance, and risk management. ZaTech has to make an effort to reach that stage where many MNCs and economically sound businesses currently have these in operation, these aren’t the global standards though.
The sustainability governance component relates to methods such as honest financial reporting, regulatory compliance, and transparency and clarity which align ZaTech’s ideals to those of the community in general (Clune & Zehnder, 2018). ZaTech’s values must also be compatible with end-user consumers, value propositions, and values of the society,
The above component is also known as the governance pillar, which refers to excellent corporate governance. It implies that perhaps the shareholders’ interests, along with those of ZaTech’s communities, supply networks, and end-users, remain aligned by the management and board of directors (BOD).
Shareholders of ZaTech might someday want to understand that ZaTech employs dependable and thorough financial processes, and shareholders are given the opportunity to vote on crucial governance issues (Khoshnava et al., 2018). Investors might even seek guarantees that corporations do not choose board members with conflicting interests, don’t utilise political donations to achieve excessively advantageous consideration, and, of course, aren’t involved in illegal acts.
This is when the economic pillar is combined with profitability, allowing ZaTech to contribute in sustainability initiatives. This economic pillar works as a counterbalance upon ZaTech’s willingness to adopt drastic measures, such as abruptly abandoning carbon fuels or synthetic fertilisers in favour of gradual changes.
The economic pillar primarily will be concerned with ZaTech’s bottom line, or profitability. To stay afloat, businesses must generate profits. Financial gain, however, cannot trump the remaining two pillars. The economic pillar isn’t concerned with making money at every cost. As mentioned before, risk management, effective governance, and Compliance will constitute the economic pillars. Although in contrast to ZaTech, many well-known corporations meet these requirements, they do not do so abroad. ZaTech’s objective at Transformation will be to emphasise long-term sustainability whilst lowering risk and generating market-level earnings and returns. Its goal is to incorporate cutting-edge technology like blockchain (Upadhyay et al., 2021) or AI into its technological operations and R&D.
The competence of enterprises to develop a sustainable economic system is the foundation of the preceding cornerstone. In other words, ZaTech must encourage and develop protection of the environment by removing the risks posed by product line of the company (Danielsen & Agnarsson, 2020). As a consequence, product recycling, as well as the usage of sustainable resources, will be important aspects of the economic pillar.
Additionally, the economic criteria would be centred on power management, alongside the goal of improving resource efficiency and hence lowering costs. This criterion’s effective application leads in certification (like B-Corp certification), that acts as a guarantee of energy efficiency.
The foundation is frequently the driving force for green initiatives being put on hold. Sustainability initiatives, for instance, are frequently the earliest to shed money and interest amid a crisis like COVID (Ranjbari et al., 2021). Emphasis migrates to economic affairs, putting the ecosystem’s sustainability on the back burner. Economic sustainability likewise entails safeguarding the protracted viability of businesses like ZaTech that will rely on environmental assets. If the resource on which ZaTech relies dries exhausted, Zatech will simply disappear. As a result, it’s in ZaTech’ best interests to ensure that environmental habitats are preserved for the upcoming years, as well as to establish new, sustainable business performance that will not jeopardise ZaTech’s long-term prosperity.
6.1 Strategy 2: Mitigating Carbon footprints, and adopting to zero-waste initiative
The environmental aspect is often the one that gets the most attention. Several companies are attempting to reduce CO2 emissions, waste production, environmental contamination, and significant ecological damage. ZaTech will follow the same trail. Such measures could have favourable financial consequences in addition to improving the environment (Lazar & Chithra, 2019). Reduced packing materials, for instance, implies cuts in spending, and greater gasoline effectiveness likewise benefits ZaTech’s budget.
As part of its zero-waste programme, ZaTech must focus on packaging, asking service providers to use less packaging along their logistics chain and to make as much of it as possible from biodegradable and recyclable raw materials.
Few other obstacles that ZaTech might face due to environmental pillar would be that its influence is frequently undervalued, resulting in inefficiencies which aren’t incorporated in price inflation. Since ZaTech currently isn’t responsible for the waste it manufactures, calculating the total costs of sewage, co2, and waste in particular is difficult. That’s where a balanced scorecard (Mehralian et al., 2019) will help ZaTech to quantify these inefficiencies such that performance could be monitored and documented in a significant manner.
This environmental component of sustainability emphasises the impacts on the environment of company actions and choices. This environmental component receives the highest priority from most businesses (Boussemart et al., 2020). Procedures, methods, and actions that lessen the environmental effect of an organisation’s infrastructure, supplies, and manufacturing are referred to as environmentally sustainable development. This is more crucial than ever for ZaTech to be conscious of how its operations will influence the ecosystem, and also to restrict and reform operations which have negative effects for our planet. ZaTech will be taking environmental measures like discovering new energy sources (Clune & Zehnder, 2020), decreasing their co2 emissions, eliminating plastic containers, and packaging its product lines with sustainable materials like papers.
This environmental element is built on a determination to preserve the environment by decreasing vulnerabilities and assessing the environmental consequences of businesses’ operations. The following are the issues that businesses face in this vicinity:
ZaTech should subsequently create targets to achieve its environmental and social performance. Such objectives must become an important aspect of ZaTech’s Corporate Social Responsibilities (CSR). Since it is described as the capacity to sustain environmental protection and renewable resource exploitation trends perpetually, the environmental component is perhaps the world’s largest genuine challenge. A relatively low environment’s assumptions that underpin, the poorer the social system’s social wellbeing plus overall least manufacturing the economic model could create.
7.1 Strategy 3: Supporting SOcial Licensing and Stakeholder Interests
This is one the most important cornerstones, and the last one in this CSR corporate plan too. It’s the pillar of society. It’s tied to a nebulous idea known as social permit, licence, or authorization. Staff members, stakeholders, as well as the community members in which ZaTech operates must all support and endorse a long-term strategy. The procedures for obtaining and maintaining this endorsement differ (Butturi et al., 2018), but somehow it ultimately boils around to employing staff equitably and becoming a positive contributor and community member, particularly domestically and internationally.
So, here ZaTech will put emphasis on retaining employees as well as participation initiatives, which include more reactive perks which include greater maternity and household perks, flexible work schedules, and learning & development initiatives. ZaTech has to develop a wide range of strategies to contribute forward to the communities (MOLINA et al., 2022), which means ZaTech can act as a fundraiser, it can emphasise sponsoring, scholarships, and investments in regional communal initiatives.
This same Social Pillar of Sustainable development looks at what ZaTech’s employees, as well as other internally and externally influenced stakeholders, are impacted and mistreated. To become socially sustainable, Zatech has to be concerned regarding the well-being of its staff and ensure a healthy engagement of its staff (Bapat & Upadhyay, 2021) and stakeholders which extends further than the corporate partnerships and associations. Partners, suppliers, and Employees benefit from socially conscious businesses because they provide security, personal development, and total wellness. Something that is as effortless as recognising and appreciating ZaTech’s employees’ efforts can go a long way toward building a long-term committed team (Garlock et al., 2018). ZaTech must be aware of ways its distribution system is managed on a global platform. ZaTech must ensure that the equipment environment across their distribution chain is secure, which employees are paid decently as per the wage acts, because zero forced or child labour is used in effort of being socially responsible giving the firm a sustainble edge. ZaTech ‘s brand and client base may soon be damaged if it is renowned for bad societal sustainability policies.
Abiding principles that encourage justice and dignity for human rights seems to be the social pillar of ZaTech’s environmental sustainability. From the perspective of these problems, the societal repercussions of ZaTech’s operation are then evaluated. The following are the foundations that this pillar is built on:
The concept of social sustainability boils loose to one primary notion: that somehow a nation’s, community at large, or organisation’s societal well-being could be sustained through time (van Wynsberghe, 2021). To accomplish this, ZaTech must strike a balance between individualistic and collective interests. ZaTech may assist to ensure that humanity across the world may live healthily with whatever they have to have to remain viable by concentrating on topics such as humanitarian and animal healthcare, protection of the environment, schooling, and sustainable societies.
ZaTech must aim for sustainability practices in its logistics systems that contribute to societal development. The products (wearable technology) that ZaTech is producing must ensure that those have a safe and healthy work environment, if they offer fair salaries to the engineers, and so forth.
If ZaTech demonstrates its commitment to assisting in the resolution of societal issues such as increasing dropout rates, it demonstrates that the company prioritises constructive change in society. Consumers who choose to do business with ZaTech that actually cares regarding youngsters would be drawn to this approach. Furthermore, implementing enhanced environmentally friendly practices demonstrates to customers and the general public that ZaTech appreciates the communities, the environmental frameworks, and the posterity. It will help ZaTech to ensure and consolidate consumer loyalty. Environmental procedures that are enhanced could also assist ZaTech in complying with environmental rules and avoiding fines. So, given the adjustments indicated in the preceding coursework of the CSR Corporate Plan, here’s how the challenges can be tackled and resolved:
Technological, ethical, legal, socioeconomic, or political, and variables are examples of external factors (Gennari & Salvioni, 2019). The attitudes, beliefs, and worries of ZaTech’s targeted consumers, as well as potential financial ability to acquire its wearable technologies, are all socio-economic issues. The socio-political attitudes of corporations from 2 dimensions which describe the approach Enterprises act towards a host administration, collaborating and accommodating partnership initiatives (Iyer & Jarvis, 2019), has to be chosen as one of the environmental external factors that can affect ZaTech’ CSR initiatives in future.
For instance, socioeconomic factors such as an individual’s level of educational attainment, heredity, the status of its surroundings, their geographical location, the ties such individuals have with their friends and family members, and so forth could have an influence on ZaTech’s CSR.
As a result, personnel with negative socioeconomic variables wouldn’t be suitable for the company, whereas consumers with positive socioeconomic variables would consume ZaTech’s wearable technologies, resulting in a rise in ZaTech’s sales. The political, ethical, and legal contexts (Michaels & Grüning, 2018), on the other side, would be concerned with the requirement to follow corporate regulations as well as the cultural and ethical standards of ZaTech’s consumers and community members.
9. Conclusion and Recommendations
9.1 Conclusion
CSR is essential for an organisation’s effective operation. Integrating corporate social responsibility into any company’s strategies and providing valuable worth to all stakeholders is alluded to as an organisational best practice. Likewise, it’s crucial for ZaTech, the given company in the case study, to remember that it has its own approach of establishing and executing CSR policies, as well as its own motives for doing so. As a result, determining a specific sense of social responsibilities can be challenging for them. However, the significance of CSR could be determined by ZaTech from the perspectives of numerous stakeholders.
ZaTech must conquer a variety of challenges. The necessity for additional consistent predictors of performance in the sphere of CSR, as well as the distribution of CSR plans, is a major problem for ZaTech. Disclosure and discussion may enable the company to appear increasingly reputable while also raising the standards of competing enterprises.
Organisations could gain an edge over its rivals by considering social requirements and adopting a fundamentally and ethically inclusive approach. Finally, involving both internal and external stakeholders in Socially responsible activities supports ZaTech’s long-term existence. Corporate social responsibility has been deeply established in the international business landscape. However, in attempt to transition from theory to practise,
From the insight that I have acquired from ZaTech’s case study, following are some of the recommendations for the firm to implement an effective CSR plan in its business operations:
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