Employers need to focus on distributed leadership, alignment, shared purpose, engagement, balancing the long-term and short- term and employee assessment in order to ensure sustainability in the future.

The CIPD today published the first year findings of its Shaping the Future research, which offers practical insights into achieving sustainable, long-term business prosperity.

The report follows six organisations - Standard Chartered, Big Lottery Fund (BIG), Birmingham City Council, Pfizer (Grange Castle), Xerox and NHS Dumfries and Galloway - all of which are undertaking change programmes. It tracks their progress, examining the challenges and opportunities they encounter, helping to stimulate debate among the 5,500 practitioners signed up to the dedicated Shaping the Future network.

The interim report, Sustainable Organisation Performance: What Really Makes the Difference? identifies the key areas that organisations need to consider on their journey to sustainable organisational performance. To successfully implement change and achieve sustainability, the report concludes that organisations need to focus on:

• Distributed leadership: senior leaders set a clear strategy but also empower and motivate managers to innovate to deliver it
• Alignment: all component parts of the organisation are focused on the same vision and values, objectives and end goal
  
• Shared purpose: core purpose is firmly set from the top, with leaders and managers at all levels contributing to ensure employees have a strong, emotional connection to that purpose
• Locus of engagement: employees can be engaged on multiple levels - with the overall purpose of the organisation, the loyalty and bond they feel to their managers or team, or to the customer. For engagement to support sustainable performance, organisations need to ensure individual, team and organisational objectives are aligned
• Balancing the short- and long-term: successful organisations are flexible enough to respond to short-term demands, but maintain sight of the long-term horizon. The decisions employees make need to reflect this balance
• Assessment and evaluation: it's not just about measuring the right things, it's also about taking the business context into account and how this data is fed back into the organisation. Data can be used not just to prove past performance but to improve for the future

Jill Miller, lead researcher at the CIPD, said: "Delivering sustainable performance is important at the best of times, but as the economy embarks on what looks set to be a long, slow climb out of recession it is more important than ever. The key finding of our work is the extent to which sustainable performance is delivered by shared endeavour at all levels.  Clear vision, strong leadership, great managers and engaged employees are all important - but these all come together to deliver sustainable performance only where shared purpose exists and is supported by co-ordinated, empowered and innovative management at all levels.

"Working with our case studies, we are identifying the enablers and blockers of sustainable organisation performance within the context of their specific change programmes. Our aim is to provide insights from the data and practical guidance that practitioners can apply to create change in their own organisations and drive performance for the long-term.

"The next stage of our research will further explore insights we have developed, as well as revisit the case study organisations to see what has changed and what they have learned. In the meantime, our interim report makes clear what organisations need to do in order to perform well."