*Sustainability and Excellence: Pillars for Business Survival DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.105420*





**Table 5.** *Guidance for enablers.*

#### **Figure 1.** *Sustainability pillars.*

Since the first pillar of sustainability—economic growth—has been defined, this has appeared important for companies to remain in competition in their field of activity. In order to maintain a constant economic growth, companies define strategic objectives and continuously implement these objectives in all areas of improvement identified using several types of performance models. This pillar may relate to the first two enablers presented in **Table 5**: Leadership and Strategy.

Second and third pillars of sustainability development cover the other three enablers presented in **Table 5**: people, partnership and resources, and some parts of processes, products, and services.

The three pillars are, also, reflected in the Business Continuity Plan of companies, plan required by the legal norms in each country. Every company must consider and establish possible actions to keep under control the impact on the society and environment in any given situation.

In order to support companies and harmonize their social behavior, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has created the standard "*ISO 26000: 2010, Guidance on Social Responsibility*" [10].

The standard contains voluntary guidance, but it does not need a certification. **Table 6** presents an example of steps that can be followed in order to implement



#### **Table 6.**

*Implementation of the ISO 26000 standard.*

the standard. Before implementing the ISO 26000, the most important step is to identify the stakeholders of the company and the impact they have on the social responsibility decisions that will be taken and implemented (see **Figure 2**).

The NEN Handbook "The implementation of SR – Best practices and tools for ISO 26000" offers a set of detailed free tools that can be used to implement the Social Responsibility (SR) in companies (see **Table 6**).


Local government



#### **Table 7.**

*The core subjects from ISO 26000 [10].*

In order to implement the SR principles and objectives in the organization management, first of all, the relevant areas of interest correlated with the core subjects of ISO 26000 should be identified. In **Table 7** are presented some relevant areas that can be important for different companies.

Companies that have implemented ISO 26000 and monitor sustainability should annually report the key performance indicators they set. In order to do that, they can use the reporting framework given by the GRI.
