Business Approaches to Sustainability

Question: Discuss about theBusiness Approaches to Sustainability. Answer: Introduction Sustainability has always been my area of interest and I believe that it must be maintained by the organizations in order to attain competitive advantages. Sustainability deals with environment conservation in a way that it can endure prosperity of the upcoming generations. I observed that most of the large companies are responsible for the environmental damages. After such observation, I have discovered that there are several more environmental concerns regarding that need to gain knowledge. I realized that, I require learning about business, society and planet conservation. Considering this, I invested more time in gaining knowledge regarding the causes and effects of such environment concerns. Observing the companys efforts in maintaining environmental sustainability, I considered gaining knowledge on Dunphys six phase model, triple bottom line along with few forms of initiatives. These initiatives from the society, NGOs and communities have contributed greatly in maintaining orga nizational sustainability. Among all these initiatives of maintaining organizational sustainability, I realized that Dunphys sustainability scale is one of the effective initiatives in enhancing environmental and organizational sustainability. This sustainability model has a huge contribution in maintaining business sustainability along with improving the environmental concerns. Dunphys sustainability scale explains phases through which a business attains sustainability and this includes rejection, lack of rejection, compliance and risk reduction, efficiency and strategic sustainability (Rajala et al., 2016). My friend has a salon business named Encore and though evaluating the phases of this model I can estimate in which stage the business is in the recent years. Encore is observed to be in the in the compliance scale of gaining competitive advantage and maintaining cost effectiveness. Figure 1: Dunphys sustainability model (Source: Starik, Stubbs Benn, 2016) Figure 2: Sustainability Scales (Source: Sloan, Klingenberg Rider, 2013) The business is believed to be in the reluctant acceptance scale as it is deemed that the company is not that aware of environmental damage and does not follow compliance and risk reduction strategies. Considering the environmental issues in came to knew that I can make great attempts to address such concerns. Implementing certain sustainable practices not only facilitates the company to decrease its increasing environmental concerns and increases consumer satisfaction. Through implementation of the green practices, the salon can reduce costs and attain market differentiation (Klettner et al., 2014). Based on the position of the company, I have realized that for the company must focus on the decrease the risk of sanctions for failing to address minimum standards set by the company. From analyzing, this stage in which the company exists and offering recommendations on the sustainability, I came to realize that the execution of the plan can be difficult but with proper implementation of the strategies the company can ensure its business and environment sustainability. After executing the plan effectively, I can make sure that the business of my friend will transform from the stage of compliance stage to the sustainability stage. If the company implements them, recommended sustainability strategies the consumers will become loyal consumers of the salon and will be willing to pay more for the services of the salon. Moreover, if the company implements environment friendly practices to improve the perception of the consumers. Based on the scale on which the company exists, it is recommended to use environment friendly beauty products in order to decrease the water and electricity usage in beatification gadgets within the salon. Encore Company is recommended to establish a system that keeps a track of the consumption of energy and generation of waste that will facilitate the company in gaining cost reductions, market differentiation and sustainability. The company is recommended to transform into the efficiency stage and then to the strategic sustainability stage and then into sustaining corporation stage. To attain the efficiency stage, Encore is recommended to make systematic attempts for integrating the human resource functions into coherent HR system that can decrease costs and enhance efficiency of the machineries used in the salon that can further decrease harmful chemicals release in the environment. I have also recommended the company to address ecological issues that results in increased costs and such issues must be reviewed systematically to enhance operational efficiency of the company by getting rid of increased waste and through reviewing the procurement, distribution and service process. From the analysis of the model, I gained an understanding that energy conservation can serve as the effective strategies to increase competitive advantages of companies. The salon requires replacing its machineries with the ones those are energy efficient to take steps in maintaining environmental as well as business sustainability (Perrott, 2014). The company must produce new products and processes. This can serve as a substitute for the environmentally damaging products and techniques, which can further deal with sustainability issues. Moreover, all the employees in the salon must be well trained regarding waste management and maintaining environmental sustainability. Such recommendation if implemented by the company will help in gaining sustainable position and I believe that it can also address my identified environmental concerns. References and Bibliographies Benn, S., Dunphy, D., Griffiths, A. (2014).Organizational change for corporate sustainability. Routledge. Ganescu, M. C. (2012). Corporate social responsibility, a strategy to create and consolidate sustainable businesses.Theoretical and Applied Economics,11(11), 91. Gollan, P. J., Xu, Y. (2014). Fostering Corporate Sustainability. InSustainability and Human Resource Management(pp. 225-245). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. Klettner, A., Clarke, T., Boersma, M. (2014). The governance of corporate sustainability: Empirical insights into the development, leadership and implementation of responsible business strategy.Journal of Business Ethics,122(1), 145-165. Perrott, B. (2014). The sustainable organisation: Blueprint for an integrated model. Journal of Business Strategy, 35(3), 26-37. Rajala, R., Westerlund, M., Lampikoski, T. (2016). Environmental sustainability in industrial manufacturing: re-examining the greening of Interface's business model.Journal of Cleaner Production,115, 52-61. Sloan, K., Klingenberg, B., Rider, C. (2013). Towards sustainability: Examining the drivers and change process within SMEs.Journal of Management and Sustainability,3(2), 19. Starik, M., Stubbs, W., Benn, S. (2016). Synthesising environmental and socio-economic sustainability models: a multi-level approach for advancing integrated sustainability research and practice.Australasian Journal of Environmental Management, 1-24.