1. Introduction

Over the past years, multinational companies have focused on adapting to several changes in technology, economy, or markets (^{Rosenberg & Mosca, 2011}). In the last decade and particularly over the past two years, sustainability has also gained a lot of importance in the transformation agenda of multinational companies (^{Appelbaum et al., 2016}).

The evolution of legislation towards stricter regulation both internationally and nationally is one of the main factors explaining this phenomenon. As an example, we can mention the case of the European Union, where the European Commission adopted the European Climate Law in July 2021, making climate-neutrality mandatory by 2050 for all European economies and societies (^{European Commission, 2022}).

As supranational laws become applicable to all European countries, they must translate it into their national legislative apparatus. In the case of France, the law against climate change was enacted to support the European law (^{Macron et al., 2021}).

This institutionalization of sustainability constraints towards private companies is a key step to putting them in motion. Indeed, as per ^{Pinheiro et al., (2022)} , the level of companies engagement and transparency on environmental and social matters reflect how country governments address them. An example of concrete commitment is the Carbon Disclosure Project: a voluntary approach applicable to both public and private sectors to publicize the measure of environmental impacts and remediation actions to minimize them (^{Oktay et al., 2021}).

In parallel, the political instability due to COVID-19 restrictions (^{McLaughlin, 2022}), the war in Ukraine or Chinese tensions within the international landscape, also impact global businesses by putting high pressure on energy and raw material availability, supply chain, and costs. This uncertainty is another trigger to rethink the way multinational companies operate their business (^{Brueckner et al., 2022}).

Also, social actors such as non-governmental organizations and civil society became more powerful and influence even the biggest actors in a market. They provide individuals with the capacity to influence collective opinions and behaviors thanks to the power of social media. Indeed, one organization or one individual can now easily damage the image of major companies for not putting enough emphasis on respecting ethics, values or simply the things that people care about (^{Boulianne, 2022}).

For this reason, there is a stream of research dedicated to studying organizational reputation. It is the system of beliefs we have about an organization or person, which generates expectations about their behaviors. In other words, reputation is an evaluation of an organization (^{Deephouse & Carter, 2005}) in terms of desirability, quality, esteem, and favorability. Therefore, many studies have focused on the importance of building and maintaining a good reputation for organizations. Moreover, they consider it an intangible asset (^{Fombrun & Shanley, 1990}).

A recent example of organizational reputation put at risk, is the case of Total Energy, a French oil company accused of selling indirectly the kerosene used by the Russian army to conduct the war in Ukraine despite the French government position against the war. Total Energy was then forced to sell all its share related to Russian gas activity (^{Grynszpan & Bouissou, 2022}).

Regarding human resources, employees themselves show more concern about sustainability, thus, it becomes a key differentiator to attract and retain talents, especially young and high qualified profiles (^{Chaudhary, 2018}).

Finally, natural disasters are becoming more frequent, even big companies are more exposed to the risk of events like fires, drought, flood, or biodiversity loss directly impacting their production, manufacturing, or supply chain (^{Fang et al., 2019}).

In that context, sustainability transformation, that is, the evolution of an organization towards a target model where the activity of the present does not compromise the capacity of future generations to satisfy their needs, is now reaching the highest level of executive committees.

Indeed, if currently digital transformation was the priority, to adapt to all major technologic changes and disruptions (^{Appelbaum et al., 2016}), we can foresee that sustainability transformation should take over in most multinational companies in the coming years.

However, organizations that started the transformation process toward sustainable operations face difficulties to scope, execute, and finalize this process. Indeed, there is no one-fits-all strategy, as it will depend on the industry and where its main Co2 footprint buckets are generated. For example, in the wine and spirits industry, the priority would be reducing glass consumption due to the carbon emitted during its production (^{Pernod Ricard Company, 2021}). While the main challenge for dairy production would be to focus on substituting cow milk by vegetable milk, maintaining an equal level of protein intake and production yield, to significantly reduce carbon emissions (^{Engelberts et al., 2021}).

This one-by-one approach is generally supported by major consulting companies, which are experts in strategy design but not in operationalization (^{Old, 1995}), nor in sustainability. In the best-case scenario, they would be associated with start-up companies, experts in sustainability, but lacking background on both transformation strategy and operationalization. This situation generates slowness, trial and errors, and, on some occasions, transformation failures and missed momentum. Operationalization is key to succeed in sustainability transformation.

It has been documented that sustainability trans-formation should be embraced as any change initiative, as it aims at switching culture and relationships with all company stakeholders (^{Stoughton & Ludema, 2012a}). As such, specific attention must be paid to not failing, as seventy percent of all change initiatives do because of human factors (^{Burnes & Jackson, 2011}).

However, it is also noticed that sustainability transformation is “a brand-new area of research that needs further attention” (^{Appelbaum et al., 2016, p.138} ).

The purpose of this article is to explore the key success factors for operationalizing a sustainability transformation and a deployment methodology. To achieve this, first of all, we present a brief literature review on sustainability transformation to list and assess existing knowledge and theories; and then, use in depth-interviews to evaluate the case of a sustainability transformation in a fast-moving-consumer-goods company (FMCG), which is among the worldwide leaders in its industry.

2. Literature review

As a first step, we carried out a search for the concept of sustainability transformation in the Business Source Complete (EBSCOhost) search engine. Considering the emerging phase of the topic in all fields, the time period was not restricted, and all databases were selected. A filter was applied to select only peer-reviewed academic papers, choosing English as key language. The thesaurus key words were restricted to corporate social responsibility, organizational change, corporate sustainability, change management, corporate culture, green business, management, organizational behavior, and international business enterprises. From this configuration, 349 results were retrieved from 1995 to 2022, out of which the first 100 were examined to select pertinent articles.

From this brief review, we will define sustainability transformation as “a fundamental long-term development of society toward enhanced human well-being built on environmental accountability and protection, as recently agreed on in the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations and addressed in the Future Earth Initiative and the EU's Grand Challenges” (^{Daedlow et al., 2016}).

Few information is available on how to address sustainability transformations from a multinational company perspective, and when available, it remains highly conceptual and theoretical.

On the vision and strategy roll-out, the article by ^{Cherrier et al. (2012)} focuses on the need of getting the right sponsorship within the highest level of the management team to successfully lead sustainability initiatives. For that purpose, the article identifies six typical profiles -three in favor and three against- usually present at this level of leadership, and underlines the fact that managers need to change their personal mindset first and then understand corporate goals and organizational purpose to succeed. Thus, the need to build a corporate identity where sustainability becomes a key differentiator is a pre-requisite. However, as per ^{Stoughton & Ludema (2012b)} , the involvement of senior management is mainly required for sponsorship purposes, but sustainability transformation can be operationalized by middle management.

Hence, considering the importance of sustainability philosophy in the company strategy definition, ^{Dominici & Palumbo (2013)} bring up the viable systems approach (VSA). It explains that decision makers need to converge stakeholders’ expectations by implementing a value creation process that considers the role of business from a social perspective. Sustainability philosophy should be a basis to define the strategy and to implement a pertinent governance model. Finally, key performance indicators (KPIs) on efficiency, effectiveness, and sustainability would enable the business to quantify the pertinence of the actions taken.

While this is a first approach to the steps to be taken to reach sustainability from an organizational perspective -aligning key stakeholders, build a sustainable strategy supported by pertinent governance instances, and monitor KPIs- it is still very generic as all these steps are usually in place for any kind of corporate transformation.

Adopting a wider view, ^{Ryan et al. (2012)} demonstrate the value of adding external stakeholders to the in-house company sustainability perspective by creating a network of relationships and interactions with non-profit organizations, public institutions, civil society, and others.

More concretely but not turned to sustainability, ^{Old (1995)} proposes a methodology to operate change management at the three levels of an organization: system (strategy, culture, structure, rewards, and information technology), observed practices, and underlying patterns. It is based on five dimensions, namely: 1) partner with the leader; 2) contextualize the change; 3) navigate the critical path; 4) bring wholeness into design process; and 5) build dynamic processes and pathways. For Old, the reconfiguration of the system towards the target will only occur if an action plan is in place and if pushback is well managed to enable the emergence of new patterns.

We noticed a need to deep-dive into the specificities of operationalizing a sustainability transformation from a corporate perspective, as the literature lacks references on the topic.

3. Methodology

Given the early stage of research on corporate sustainability transformations, and the lack of literature addressing its operationalization properly, the most appropriate approach to explore that matter was to adopt a qualitative methodology, emphasizing the challenges, conditions for success, and steps to be taken in a corporate environment.

To do so, in-depth interviews with semi-structured questions were conducted to explore professionals’ insights in an international FMCG company. The company was selected purposefully, since it has operated several transformations in the past, such as a digital acceleration program initiated five years ago and that is still in progress, at the same time, it has run an important program around sustainability, thus allowing some employees to become knowledgeable and able to share their return of experience. The contact with the company was made through an employee found in the professional social network LinkedIn.

The sample was selected intentionally by identifying the main stakeholders on transformation and sustainability within the organization. In total, thirty-two people were interviewed to cover the following functional areas: human resources, manufacturing, supply chain, finance, marketing, procurement, technology, and sustainability. The characterization of participants is detailed in Table 1, based on responsibility area, position, years working at the company, sustainability expertise, number of direct reports (internal resources only), and gender.

The interviews took place between August 26^th, 2022, and September 7^th, 2022, with an average duration of one hour. Each interview was recorded by OneNote Office360 software by the interviewer. As the company headquarters are in France, twenty-four interviews took place in French and eight interviews were conducted in English for non-French speakers.

The interview format was semi-structured questions aiming to understand the journey to current status, remaining challenges, and key success factors for the sustainability transformation conducted in the company. The instrument is shown in the annex.

As an introduction, interviewees were shared the definition of a sustainable development: “a development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (^{Brundtland, 1987, p.39} ); and informed of the objectives of the discussion.

After that, a verbatim analysis was conducted, first, manually searching for convergent trends among answers as well as differences. In a second stage, data was processed using the ^{ATLAS.ti software (version 23.1.1.0, 2023)}, looking for a more detailed explanation of the results.

4. Findings

As an introduction to the findings of this study, it is important to note that it relies on a qualitative exploratory methodology, and as such, the results cannot be generalized to other companies nor context. However, it is an opportunity to start the discussion on how to operate a wide-company-scale sustainability transformation in a complex organization where the value chain, ownership, processes, and tools are multiple and fragmented. The purpose of this study is then to open a debate on the conditions to efficiently operate a corporate sustainability transformation at scale.

It is important to specify the sustainability scopes defined by the organization.

The sustainability transformation conducted in the company is defined around three dimensions: lands, circular making, and people. These dimensions imply looking after all aspects of the products' lifecycle, from raw material sourcing to product end of life.

As for preserving lands, as all products come from nature, it is a priority to secure the yield and quality of the fields today and in the future. In that context, environmental standards certifications are in place, and several biodiversity protection and regenerative agriculture programs were launched. The next step to preserve lands would be to systematize data collection to enable better progress monitoring and future scale-up.

About circular making, the objective is to minimize waste at every step of a product lifecycle, from production to end of life, through specific actions to preserve water and promote eco-packaging, for example. As a circular concept, it focuses on reducing, reusing, and recycling raw material as much as possible, with a continuous effort made on research and innovation. There may be a challenge in some cases related to the legislation; at this stage it doesn’t allow them to switch from glass to carton to reduce product carbon footprint. Therefore, the next step in circular making would be to enable bulk transportation towards consumers location, enabling a local bottling and deposit systems.

About people, the company cares mainly about the people working for the company and their ecosystem. It consists in ensuring that both employees and suppliers promote inclusiveness, diversity, equality, and education. As operations are managed worldwide, the next step would be to apply the same level of human rights and well-being reliability to the partners involving several layers of outsourced employees.

At this stage, the sustainability transformation started several years ago and is headed by a team reporting directly to the CEO. From their feedback and other business stakeholders involved, it seems like several operationalization challenges remain to be tackled. For instance, the implementation of sustainability indicators, organizational silos, and the shift towards a sustainable business model. From there, key factors to succeed may be to systematize a culture of measuring, introduce a transversal eco-governance, and conceptualize the transformation at scale with a progressive expansion. This last point is also documented as a step-by-step process, integrating the lessons learnt by the interviewees during the journey.

5. Results and Discussion

Recently, it has been acknowledged that sustainability should be more results oriented and contribute to building knowledge on how to transform to reach it (^{Dorninger et al., 2020}). In that context, this present article relies on the most recent and empirical knowledge of the employees of a FMCG company to identify the critical factors to successfully transform an organization in the long term and turn words into facts.

Several challenges were identified around the environmental footprint calculation, organizational silos, and sustainable business model shift. For each one, a key success factor was shared.

First, a common process must be adopted, and a knowledge base documented to bring a global view of the company’s position on sustainability. It means to systematize the culture of measuring, simulating, deciding, implementing, and iterating to be able to identify key improvement areas, prioritize the most significant environmental footprint optimization levers, and track results. It must also integrate multiple smaller action plans as proofs of concept toward sustainability, encompassing topics such as water management, biodiversity or inclusiveness to really transform the whole company ecosystem.

Second, a transversal eco-governance should emerge and integrate all business functions: sustainability, operations, human resources, finance, marketing, sales, legal, and IT to impulse the company transformation in one-single direction and avoid silos between functions, as well as to involve all company layers to avoid dis-connection between global and local teams. Another important point is to enrich the eco-governance bodies with the participation of stakeholders coming from outside of the company, either community representatives (farmers, glass suppliers), industry experts, or scientists and researchers.

Third and last, it is key to create a team to conceptualize the sustainability transformation set-up at scale, with a progressive expansion in its operationalization. This means to start small and then expand, keeping the right complexity, i.e., manage local specificities that make sense due to local legal or operational constraints, but removing bad complexity, i.e., all barriers to sustainability implementation at scale. This team should report independently and directly to the CEO.

Therefore, each challenge could deserve a specific study to deep dive into how to resolve them from the administration research perspective, and an analysis could be done on remediation actions implemented over time to evaluate their effectiveness.

Regarding the sustainability operationalization, the main steps reported are common to a usual transformation program: writing the vision that the transformation will enable to achieve, clarifying the mandate within the organization; delimiting the scope in terms of geography and functions involved; defining the strategy of levers to be activated in a three to five years horizon; designing the organization structure that will support its implementation; establishing a governance that will pilot the roadmap and make decisions; constituting a service catalogue specialized on sustainability problems; building key performance indicators to monitor progress; and accompanying people mindset and practices transition toward the vision through a change management plan.

Still, sustainability is a wide topic and there are many perspectives to address it. Here, the studied sample is made of employees from one single company, which is too limited to extrapolate results. It would be suitable to expand the research to other industries or types of actors, like consultancy or start-up, to compare sustainability operationalization methodologies.

This article aims at bringing new elements to understand corporate sustainability transformation; however, it is still part of an exploratory phase, which means that a lot remains to be looked-at, documented, investigated, and further discussed.