This is a disorienting moment for corporate sustainability. One that requires intentional leadership and cultural attention. You may be navigating budget cuts, priority shifts, or both. Either way, now is the time to shift your focus inward—not as a retreat, but as a deliberate act of strengthening.
Think of your company as a tree, with culture as its roots. While the branches may become barren in the cold of winter, strong roots will help the tree regenerate when the atmosphere changes. When you root company culture in sustainability and social impact, they become integral to how people think and operate.
Building a Resilient Corporate Impact Culture
Right now, you may not have big budgets or new initiatives to launch—but there is plenty to be done in building the culture and systems that make lasting impact possible. Here's what that work can look like in practice:
- Build Bridges Within the Organization
Too often sustainability lives in a central office disconnected from other business units. Set a goal to speak with at least three people outside of your department each week. Ask what's keeping them up at night (supply chain disruptions? rising energy costs? talent retention?) and identify how sustainability initiatives might help address the problems they're already trying to solve. For example, a procurement lead worried about supplier reliability might be interested in programs that strengthen local supply chains. An operations manager facing rising cooling costs might welcome energy efficiency initiatives that also reduce carbon emissions. Take note of pain points, opportunities, and potential champions. When budgets tighten, solving other people's problems can become your most valuable currency.
The goal is to build stronger relationships across the organization. Those relationships will help you sell new initiatives through a shared understanding of how they will strengthen the business. You’ll develop shared language across the organization to help address challenges together.
- Inspire Champions with Recognition
Recognition costs nothing and creates lasting value. When people embody sustainability culture, celebrate them. This can be a simple email to someone's boss noting their contributions, a newsletter with a recognition section, or a shoutout in a staff meeting. It can also be more elaborate, such as a showcase celebrating how people across the business are delivering impact through shared value.
HR can be a valuable ally here. HR departments often have discretionary budgets for employee engagement and morale-building. A recognition program that highlights sustainability champions serves multiple purposes: it boosts morale, builds cultural flagbearers for your work, and demonstrates cross-functional leadership that earns you credibility.
With support from senior management, you can take this further by creating an innovation challenge to crowdsource new ideas. Frame it as an opportunity for employees to propose ideas that decrease costs, increase efficiencies, or build new business models. This builds morale while surfacing practical solutions that connect sustainability directly to business value.
- Ready Yourself for Partnership
One of the most powerful tools for sustainability and impact is partnership. Resonance has supported more than 350 partnerships across sectors and industries. This experience has shown us the importance of internal readiness to partner. The organizations that reap the greatest benefit from partnerships are those that come with specific strategic objectives, robust internal alignment, and a strong understanding of how their own capabilities can be complementary.
Preparing the organization for partnership will ensure you can take advantage of opportunities as they arise. Being ready to partner means knowing yourself, your challenges, your assets, and your internal processes and systems, as well as knowing who else is out there and building relationships.
Conduct an internal assessment on readiness to partner. Some of the questions you might ask are:
- What shared community or industry challenges do we face?
- Which of our assets could be valuable to external partners? (Data, distribution, expertise, facilities, funding)
- Do we have both executive sponsorship and local market buy-in? If not, how can we build it?
- How have we partnered effectively in the past? What can we learn from past challenges?
Combined with the insights you've gained from working with professionals in other parts of the business, this assessment positions you to show up with solutions and articulate your organizational value to potential partnerships.
The Path Forward
The sustainability leaders who emerge from this period strongest will be the ones who used this time to weave sustainability into the fabric of their organizations and positioned themselves to take advantage of future opportunities. Internal work is quieter than launching a new initiative or announcing a bold target. It happens in hallway conversations, procurement decisions, problem framing, and problem solving. It may not make headlines, but it drives change that lasts.
The external environment will shift again—it always does. When it does, the organizations that spent time deepening roots will be ready to grow.
If you're looking for support conducting an organizational readiness assessment, developing a stakeholder engagement strategy, or identifying opportunities to deepen your sustainability culture, we'd welcome a conversation.
Resonance is an award-winning sustainability and impact advisory firm, working with leading companies, governments, and philanthropies to deliver impact and advance sustainable prosperity for all.
Learn more about how we can support your organization manage change and build partnership through a free, 30 minute consultation: https://www.resonanceglobal.com/contact-us
