Sustainable Change: Building Resilience Advancing Corporate Social Responsibility

Background

Very few would argue that the COVID-19 emergency has made bare an overabundance of societal issues with vast economic and social effects, unfortunately precise evaluation of the impact has yet to be attained. Such an assessment is contingent upon on wide-ranging concern such as the development and rollout of updated and current vaccine variants, new federal policies, and mandates in retort to covid-related problems. In addition, how corporations’ plan or intend to respond to and counteract the challenges is at the forefront of the minds of business owners, employees, and other members of society.

Organizations must seek ways to meet the demands of the moment, one approach is the move towards greater corporate agility. Agile organizations will benefit by increased competitive advantage during the wind down phase that we are now experiencing and after most certainly after the pandemic has subsided. Organizations may realize this level of success by distinctly delineating renewed sustainability strategies and initiatives, and social corporate responsibility that demonstrate the ability meet the stakeholder’s expectations while building needed competency, capacity, and capability for sustained optimized change. COVID-19 and the fallout are creating massive challenges across the globe for organizations of all sizes and has devastated most Sustainable Development Goals (Tischendorf, 2020). The pandemic has presented businesses with a range of unimagined problems. As a result, the federal government has sprung into action to provide corporations with some much-needed relief. The relief comes in the form of financial assistance such as bailouts. But which organizations were afforded this relief and in what amounts?

Considerable assurance has been given by the federal government in partnership with banks and financial institutions, to support a green recovery with the use of public resources. The question, that becomes apparent to citizens worried about the way public funds are used, is to ask decision makers that govern issues related to corporate social responsibility, should this funding be reserved for or distributed based on the level of economic inclusivity for green sustainability. A recovery consistent with moving towards a green organization will pointedly enhance their resilience, economies, and society in general.

COVID-19 has manifested unparalleled challenges for organizations as they seek to survive destructive realities and assuage future risks for their stakeholders in specific and broader society in general (Crane, 2020). When political, fiscal, and social environments are volatile corporate organizations are faced with the endless battle for market differentiation and increased profits, while balancing the need to attract and maintain exceptional employees coupled with the maintenance of a suitable growing market share and customer base. In other words, these organizations must demonstrate the capability to be resilient. Resilience in business or organizational management can be thought of as an interdisciplinary idea that shelters a range of research fields, such as economics, physics, mathematics, analytics, psychology, engineering, social science, law, medicine, and others that demonstrate an organization’s ability to recover after it has been reeked with and devastated by the ongoing disruption and global impact of an occurrence such as COVID-19 (Wendong et al., 2019).