loader image
Skip to main content
If you continue browsing this website, you agree to our policies:
x
Completion requirements

Read this article and pay attention to how companies achieve high-quality performance for value creation. Focus on the selection of KPIs and the discussion. How can organizations improve sustainability in their strategies to improve certain KPIs?

Sustainability Perspective

In the final step of our work, based on the literature and the contributions of the managers, we standardized and selected the most relevant and suitable KPIs connected to the value creation process. We thought about how to include these aspects in the strategy implementation. To this end, we discussed with the managers (final part of the questionnaire) how to account for the sustainability issues analyzed. We structured a sustainability perspective using the SBSC framework (Figure 7). Prior studies attempted to identify potential solutions to encapsulated sustainability dimensions in the strategy. Although these papers contributed significantly, they did not focus on the practical aspects, which only the interviews allowed us to grasp. One strength of the SBSC lies in its ability to bridge the gap between strategic and operative levels, identifying environmental and social aspects that are necessary to secure a company's financial success. The SBSC is one of the most effective system in integrating all sustainability dimension and strategy.

The selection of KPIs depends on the type of company and its aims. The new perspective allows us to consider sustainability dimensions as an integral part of the strategy. All dimensions are considered, identifying for each of them: (1) strategic sustainability goals to achieve high performance; (2) the most relevant KPI to monitor and evaluate performance; (3) measures to calculate the chosen KPI; and (4) the target, or the level to achieve in order to guarantee success for the company, depending on its characteristics (Figure 8).

Figure 8.
The sustainability perspective.


Accordingly, all objectives, KPIs, measures, and targets have to be defined and linked to long-term success and measured by the economic dimension. In this context, it is necessary to identify and determine the strategic relevance of the dimensions considered. Therefore, in this step, all aspects that affect the business unit and are strategically relevant need to be considered. In the last step, the sustainability perspective needs to be implemented in order to integrate its dimensions into the traditional financial aspects to achieve sustainable value creation.

Finally, it is important to point out that the proposed perspective was also designed in relation to the other conventional perspectives, including the critical; it cannot be denied, for example, that lowering costs due to sanctions can have a positive effect on the financial perspective, and the same could be said for increasing customer satisfaction, which would undoubtedly have a positive effect from the client's perspective, while increasing employee satisfaction would have a positive impact on internal processes, product quality, and the degree of customer satisfaction, and consequently the financial perspective.