Reflective Essay On Sustainability.

You must demonstrate your understanding of the chosen concepts, and how they apply to the business in question.  This could be a business you are directly connected with, for example as an employee, or as a shareholder or it could be a company that you just have an interest in. You should ensure you have access to information about the business, such as through it’s website and media exposure.  

In your response, you should also consider and recommend how the business could improve it’s approach, or if you believe this is not necessary, explain why.

The concept of sustainability and its association with business

Sustainability is not a new idea for me but for me it is associated with current development in Malaysia. After beginning this course, I realised that my horizon required to be widened to international level. I have seen that sustainability can be associated with several aspects not just urban establishment but also business and daily lifestyle.  This is because the way in which people leave can have a severe impact on the sustainability of the planer and can affect our successor (Ng et al. 2017). As a student of business communication and management, I have recently become aware of the fact, that there are several designers and workers who works with materials such as packaging of products, flyers, and advertising mail, promotional booklets and paper posters. However, these products are often discarded after they have been used once and I believe being professional workers, they have a complete responsibility in understanding the impact of this product in our environment (Snelson-Powell, Grosvold & Millington, 2016). This is due to the fact, we are all living in a world that has turned dependent on the consumption of the natural resources for our convenience, and still we are not establishing ways to tackle the ecological influence, which can be reduced. Being concerned workers, we always have the capability to recycle papers, and buy vegetables other than chemical based products; we can be aware of consumption of energy and be aware of minimum printing of papers. However, being communicators we can also spread the awareness to the people by informing them about the matter of sustainability and its impact. Along with the use of eco-friendly methods and design there is an opportunity to influence the customers by making them with their own methods of sustainability (Gast, Gundolf & Cesinger, 2017).

 However, in this study we have aimed to recognise the factors that allow the business owners to manage their business in a sustainable way. The existing argument in this context focusing on the economic and social factor of business along with physiological as well as motivational factors (Gholami et al., 2016). From my  best knowledge, the various types of factors that can be associated with the sustainable ownership, have not been studies in a proper way and these factors have not as well been ranked for the determining the consequences. The factors that may affect the business are environmental factors, economic, human relations, and psychological factors that can have greatest influence on business.

Sustainable ownership is a multidimensional idea that encompasses the economic factors associated with the preservation of the environment as well as the surroundings (Kweh et al., 2017). At the same time, the objective of enhancing the environment and emerging toward the social wellbeing, sustainable ownership may influence structural formation of society and help in promoting sustainable technologies related with the sustainable approaches.

Owing to an existing project based on Consumerists, I got the opportunity to research on a topic of excessive consumption of things and its influence on the world and business. By doing so, I came across several interesting facts around the way in which western society has increased its method on an international scale (Chin, Tat & Sulaiman, 2015).

Factors associated with sustainable ownership in Malaysia

On the contrary, sustainability can have a positive impact on the organisation by eliminating waste and by promoting a responsible viewpoint in the eyes of the customers and employees by leading them to green initiates that can limit the cost of products and can enhance products.  For instance, hotel business can promote themselves  as green by motivating the visitors to utilise towels more than one day for reducing pollution ushered from the laundry soap and the energy used from the washing and drying (Taib et al., 2015). The activities that the hotel business do not highlight is the reduction in cost and expansion of profit. The supermarkets are also reducing their use of shopping plastic bags.

However, people have various viewpoints on sustainability; it is evident that people are becoming more and aware of these, through television advertisement and other forms of media. In the existing ears, there are several shopping platforms in Malaysia, where the product that are shown on internet comes with an attractive prices, some clothes can be purchased by 10 to 15 Malaysian dollars with an procurement cist that cost only about 20 Malaysian dollars (Lim & Biswas, 2015).

 In Malaysia, sustainable development is at a stage of growth as the companies in Malaysia have been too quick in jumping in to the issues of sustainable management, specifically in association with corporate social responsibility approaches. However, from my courses I have learned that sustainable development in Malaysia has for long been interpreted from a strict Western oriented value process (Basri, Ramli & Aliyu, 2015). These may as well pose threat for the Malaysian companies as they tend to implement sustainable practices in to the process, in this for major issues can be highlighted in relation to the factors that affect the sustainable development of business such as socio economic development.

Sustainable development is an idea that came in to mainstream international agenda followed by a report published by the world commission on environment and development. Followed by this it has been observed that all the companies in Malaysia located at international location and domestic location are embracing sustainable development based on the requirement of corporate sustainable responsibility approaches (Jamali & Karam, 2015). Sustainable development shows the impact of the factors such as economic, social and political factors. According to my knowledge of learning sustainable development of business is the requirement that meets the requirement of the existing situation without compromising the capability of upcoming generations.

Although at an initial period of operation within a macro level, sustainable development has found its way down at the corporate stage. However, I would say that existing managers of the organisation considers sustainable development as the important component of corporate strategy while formulating the programs of CSR. In this case, the social and environmental issues often influence when the organisations are under high pressure from social NGOS and media activities as well as government, their business. These issues influence the business so much so that, which both the concept of sustainability are often, used interchangeability. In Malaysia, Bursa Malaysia utilizes the term sustainability, for the sake of its corporate site, to provide its report for the CSR. According to my learning, I have seen that, in order to incorporate, sustainable development within the business; there are various calls from the accounting and finance section that helps in expansion of overall net profit of business.

The opportunities for businesses to adopt sustainable practices

However, the critical issues of sustainable growth that is needed to taken in to consideration is that the developing economy of Malaysia is comprised of Muslim majority population along with other ethnic population (Koe, Omar & Sa’ari, 2015). In this context, the very issues of CSR is to focus on the issue that arise out of the conception in between various firms and the society.

I have seen that every time I purchase a new phone from the nee launched ones, despite the fact that the old one is not broken down. I have realised that if I try to change my bad habit, I will be able to save some more of my money and will be able to protect the planet. Although established planets are now misusing the resources of third world but they are claiming that they are using it to develop and grow their economy. According to my notion these, are just frauds to cheat the third world, since most of the factories belong to the third world economies where the cost of labour are relatively low (Basri, Ramli & Aliyu, 2015). The rules and regulation are to loosen so that the countries are able to do many things that helps to deplete the natural capital in the third world such as consumption if energy and utilisation of raw materials.  

The report highlights an business evaluation report on sustainability and principles used for corporate business.  The study is based on the idea that business organisations are needed to address corporate social responsibility and sustainable initiatives. However, since the global warming is at a sharp rise, it is necessary for the organisation to follow the strategies of sustainability at all the stages of the growth such as Micro and Macro level. Based on this factors, the study have elucidated factors that influences sustainability during the growth of business. This has been presented in the report with a brief presentation of Malaysian companies that needs improvement. Therefore, business organisation needs to obtain sustainability for increasing the development of the economy and to assist the local people.

There is an increasing evidence of an unsustainable future with an existing rate of consumption of natural resources and its impact on the environment. Recent disasters around the globe are catastrophic in nature and very adverse due to the increase of global warming. Influences of global warming are quite evident and can be seen in changes in the availability of water, security of food that may affect large number of people. Sustainability of the organisation also required to act in International footprint defines the concept of sustainability as the improvement that can be done for addressing the issues of the present age and the existing time without doing off the creativity of the upcoming age for satisfying their own specific requirement. Sustainability is the need to avoid depletion of the natural resources for sustaining an ecological balance in the environment. However, there are millions of human beings and different types of living beings, which are highly influenced by pollution.

Challenges and solutions for sustainable development in Malaysia

Business organisations have an important role to play in the accomplishment of sustainability.  From the period of industrialisation, business organisations have contributed highly towards the development of the economy, to the growth of environment and society in a positive as well as negative way. It is the influence of macro factors, which people experiences in today’s world. As stated by Richards and Zen (2016), the issues are seen in the form of big business scandals and many environmental accidents. In this context, the stakeholders realised that it is necessary to educate the society and business to treat the society in a proper way.  In Malaysia, Bursa Malaysia Company is moving ahead within agenda to bring corporate governance in accordance to the sustainable growth. In the year 2007, they had developed a company that is mandatorily listed in Bursa Malaysia for reporting to Corporate Social Responsibility. In the year 2010, the company also launched their sustainability framework that intends to educate and promote the Malaysian business organisations with sustainable growth of business activities (Gong et al., 2018). The movement has been set up by the companies to provide a positive impact on the establishment of corporate social responsibility activities in Malaysia. The approaches has also been set up to increase the awareness of the stakeholders in accordance to the benefits of sustainable activities’.

However, supply chain management sustainability is highly used in the business that influences the supply chain of the organisation in relation to environmental and waste of cost. This is because there is an increasing need for incorporating with the environmental choice of supply chain management. Government pressure can influence the organisation by creating pressure on the suppliers and vendors; therefore, they are required to operate in a sustainable way in order to meet the future issues.  

Again, sustainable human resource management path will help the companies and the HR managers to understand the operational elements for fostering high performance of CSR within organisation.  Therefore, the human resource employees have the major role to play in helping the company in achieving the sustainable CSR objectives through employee engagement and motivation.

While building business and functioning business, sustainability needs to be taken in to consideration. The variables antagonistically affect upon the nature. This are needed to be dealt with and is required to be polished for the betterment of the society.

In order to develop a nation, industrialisation is one of the major factors that is required to be emphasised on. However, the factors of industrialisation is needed to be carried out and the factors of sustainability is needed to be taken in to consideration.

No matter how much the internal factors of the components functions, the overall economic and political climate may influence the sustainability of business and the business capacity to get things done, whether at federal state, and local region. Therefore, Aras, Aras, and Ingley (2016) stated that highs and lows within the political support for the project and their factors of funding could increase the stress on the projects. This may make things difficult to offer consistent standards of services.

Projects are more likely to obtain objectives with a wide base of support from the community. Companies that are socially accountable usually have lesser amount of risk of adverse incidents. However, Breitbarth et al., (2015) asserts that while evaluating the business at the expenditure of a significant risk, encountering the negative impact of environment and social factors are common factors. In this context, the risks related to CSR are classified into three different types such as corporate governance, environmental factors and social factors. Therefore, organisations that implement the CSR strategies are likely to be more transparent and less risk free from bribery and corruption related issues. Moreover, those companies can adopt strict and standards environmental control resources for avoiding risk of damaged product lines and pay penalties for creating pollution.

According to Kiliç, Kuzey and Uyar (2015), there are several other issues that highlights CSR issues in business. Some of the CSR approaches help in drastically reduction of operating costs. For instance, reducing packaging products, and designing an optimal path for the delivery trucks for reducing the environmental impact of operations (Murphy et al., 2016). However, the process of implementing CSR guidelines may encourage the managers to reconsider their business and find out more effective ways to operate.

Organisation  that are considered to  have strong dedication towards CSR often have increased chances of attracting and retaining more employees, that may lead to reduction of employee turnover, recruitment and cost of training. In this context, employees working for the company easily analyses the company’s CSR performance for determining if the conflict of the personal value to the business is in which they work (Mokhtar, Jusoh & Zulkifli, 2016). However, organisation that tend to enhance their working conditions and employment activities may also experienced increased amount of productivity and reduction in the rate of error. Therefore, permanent management of production facilities around the globe will help in ensuring that all the employees are working under suitable conduction.

Sustainable development is the requirement that meets the necessities without compromising the capability of the upcoming generations.  However, Hoang, Abeysekera and Ma (2018) states that sustainable growth intends to generate mutual understanding among human beings and in between different humanity. The idea of sustainable growth has been highly popularised by the world Commission on Environment and Development. Therefore, sustainable growth involves with the incorporation environmental, social and economic factors within the country.

The Global sustainability reporting signifies the sustainability reporting as the activities of measuring, exposing and being accountable to the internal and external stakeholders for increasing the organisational performance towards the objective of sustainable growth (Hamid et al., 2014). To be specific, sustainability reporting implies a single consolidated exposure that offers a reasonable and proper presentation of performance over a fixed duration of time. The value of an organisation is influenced by the standard of the relation with different levels of internal and external shareholders.

As stated by Jamali and Karam (2018), the abilities of the organisation to interact in an effective way with the major stakeholders can be critical for attaining sustainability and growth within the organisation. Effective use of sustainability reporting will provide benefits to the organisation by aligning and by taking advantage of the shareholders’ value and capture of functional activity in an effective way. However, in Malaysia, sustainable reporting are not compulsory reporting system in all companies to expose their sustainability activity. Companies are now increasingly identifying the essentiality for them to report activities for achieving sustainability of the company and help them bring closer to their shareholders.

The Asian economic crisis that took place in the year 1997 is an part of crisis that influenced the country followed by an prolonged recession in Japan that as well had an negative influence on the economic performance of Malaysia (Nordensvard, Urban & Mang, 2015). To be specific, many believed that lack of proper corporate governance is one of the major reason for the occurrence of economic crisis in Malaysia.

As stated by Haron, Ismail and Oda, (2015), major improvements within the system of corporate governance activities will help in contribution towards a better disclosure within the business report. This will as well help the company in improving performance and facilitating larger market liquidity in the growing market. Therefore, corporate governance is a necessary factor for this investors, insurance organisation, creditors, employees and shareholders for maintaining the sustainability in workplace.

Conclusion and recommendations

Therefore, from the above study it can be said that cost of the environment and cost of the regulations will consistently grow parallely within the growing awareness of the society and companies towards the growth of environmental concerns. Therefore, being a scope for the potential users that may help in covering both internal and external stakeholders, there needs to be a confirmation on the transparency and dependability of the information that this disclose.

However, the main factors that is needed to be kept in consideration, is the organisation’s adherence to corporate social responsibility and corporate governance for addressing the environmental concern. This would help in reduction of cost of labour and business practices by allowing the companies to move towards green business and sustainable business principle that has an impact on the broader community as well as environment.  From the above study, it has been seen that there are several factors that tends to impact on the business negatively. All these issues can be tackled though the adoption of sustainable and green practices of business thereby increasing the wellbeing of the society.

Reference list

Aras, G., Aras, G., & Ingley, C. (Eds.). (2016). Corporate Behavior and Sustainability: Doing Well by Being Good. Taylor & Francis.

Basri, N. A., Ramli, A. T., & Aliyu, A. S. (2015). Malaysia energy strategy towards sustainability: a panoramic overview of the benefits and challenges. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 42, 1094-1105.

Breitbarth, T., Walzel, S., Anagnostopoulos, C., & van Eekeren, F. (2015). Corporate social responsibility and governance in sport:“Oh, the things you can find, if you don’t stay behind!”. Corporate Governance, 15(2), 254-273.

Chin, T. A., Tat, H. H., & Sulaiman, Z. (2015). Green supply chain management, environmental collaboration and sustainability performance. Procedia CIRP, 26, 695-699.

Gast, J., Gundolf, K., & Cesinger, B. (2017). Doing business in a green way: A systematic review of the ecological sustainability entrepreneurship literature and future research directions. Journal of Cleaner Production, 147, 44-56.

Gholami, H., Rezaei, G., Saman, M. Z. M., Sharif, S., & Zakuan, N. (2016). State-of-the-art Green HRM System: sustainability in the sports center in Malaysia using a multi-methods approach and opportunities for future research. Journal of Cleaner Production, 124, 142-163.

Gong, M., Simpson, A., Koh, L., & Tan, K. H. (2018). Inside out: The interrelationships of sustainable performance metrics and its effect on business decision making: Theory and practice. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 128, 155-166.

Hamid, F. Z. A., Atan, R., & Saleh, M. S. M. (2014). A case study of corporate social responsibility by Malaysian government link company. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 164, 600-605.

Haron, H., Ismail, I., & Oda, S. (2015). Ethics, corporate social responsibility and the use of advisory services provided by SMEs: lessons learnt from Japan. Asian Academy of Management Journal, 20(1), 71.

Hoang, T. C., Abeysekera, I., & Ma, S. (2018). Board diversity and corporate social disclosure: evidence from Vietnam. Journal of Business Ethics, 151(3), 833-852.

Jamali, D., & Karam, C. (2018). Corporate social responsibility in developing countries as an emerging field of study. International Journal of Management Reviews, 20(1), 32-61.

Kiliç, M., Kuzey, C., & Uyar, A. (2015). The impact of ownership and board structure on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting in the Turkish banking industry. Corporate Governance, 15(3), 357-374.

Koe, W. L., Omar, R., & Sa’ari, J. R. (2015). Factors Influencing Propensity to Sustainable Entrepreneurship of SMEs in Malaysia. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 172, 570-577.

Kweh, Q. L., Alrazi, B., Chan, Y. C., Abdullah, W. M. T. W., & Lee, R. M. A. (2017). Environmental, social and governance and the efficiency of government-linked companies in Malaysia. Institutions and Economies, 55-74.

Lim, C. I., & Biswas, W. (2015). An evaluation of holistic sustainability assessment framework for palm oil production in Malaysia. Sustainability, 7(12), 16561-16587.

Mokhtar, N., Jusoh, R., & Zulkifli, N. (2016). Corporate characteristics and environmental management accounting (EMA) implementation: evidence from Malaysian public listed companies (PLCs). Journal of cleaner production, 136, 111-122.

Murphy, M. J., MacDonald, J. B., Antoine, G. E., & Smolarski, J. M. (2016). Exploring Muslim attitudes towards corporate social responsibility: Are Saudi business students different?. Journal of Business Ethics, 1-16.

Ng, S. I., Chia, K. W., Ho, J. A., & Ramachandran, S. (2017). Seeking tourism sustainability–A case study of Tioman Island, Malaysia. Tourism Management, 58, 101-107.

Nordensvard, J., Urban, F., & Mang, G. (2015). Social innovation and Chinese overseas hydropower dams: The nexus of national social policy and corporate social responsibility. Sustainable Development, 23(4), 245-256.

Richards, C., & Zen, I. S. (2016). From surface to deep corporate social responsibility: the Malaysian no plastic bags campaign as both social and organizational learning. Journal of Global Responsibility, 7(2), 275-287.

Snelson-Powell, A., Grosvold, J., & Millington, A. (2016). Business school legitimacy and the challenge of sustainability: A fuzzy set analysis of institutional decoupling. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 15(4), 703-723.

Taib, M., Yazid, M., Mohamed Udin, Z., & Abdul Ghani, A. (2015). The development of green management and green technology in green manufacturing in Malaysia. Journal of Technology and Operations Management, 10(1), 40-47.