Business engagement for the SDGs in COVID-19 time: an Italian perspective

2.1 The SDGs and the role of business

The SDGs are at the heart of the UN Agenda 2030 (UN, 2015). They consist of a set of 17 core objectives and 169 accompanying targets to be reached by 2030. Since the achievement of the SDGs requires actions and collaboration by all competent agents, businesses have been called upon “to apply their creativity and innovation to solving sustainable development challenges” (UN, 2015, p. 29). Consequently, most large companies have started to make unique contributions to the SDGs (United Nations Global Compact and DNV GL, 2020) by enhancing their corporate sustainability practices, attaining environmental integrity, addressing social equity, and sustaining economic prosperity (Bansal, 2015). Many inspiring breakthroughs and successful business stories are showing results and impacts all over the world. A recent report by GRI and Support the Goals found that 83% of a sample of over 200 companies around the world state their support for the SDGs and recognize the value of aligning their sustainability plans with the SDGs [Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and Support the Goals, 2022].

Business contributions to the SDGs have been addressed in several academic studies (Mio et al., 2020; Pizzi et al., 2020), which recently focused on the threats and challenges posed by COVID-19 (Hörisch, 2021; Schaltegger, 2021). Linked to this point, recent research emphasises a real need to hone in on the understanding of how companies cope with the pandemic crisis (Hörisch, 2021).

Therefore, gaining a better understanding of the business engagement for the SDGs during this period of crisis is of paramount importance because a disruptive change in the way all business actors think, plan and act is deemed necessary and urgent to achieve the creation of “innovations that do good and avoid harm” (Gutierrez et al., 2022, p. 2).

2.2 COVID-19 and the SDGs

Sustainable development has been seriously challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic (Hörisch, 2021). Several studies systematically report how the pandemic has profoundly and dramatically threatened the achievement of all the SDGs (Da Cruz et al., 2020; Naidoo and Fisher, 2020; Sachs et al., 2020; Santos-Carrillo et al., 2020; UN, 2020b; United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 2020; United Nations Global Compact and DNV GL, 2020; van Zanten and van Tulder, 2020), compromising some progress already made in many sustainable areas. The size, scope and pace of the pandemic pose the significant risk:

That most political capital and limited financial resources be absorbed by the response and diverted away from the implementation of the Nationally Determined Contributions to achieve climate targets and the Sustainable Development Goals (UN, 2020a, p. 11).

Despite these challenges, some authors interpret the pandemic as a catalyst for progress, which makes extant sustainability challenges impossible to ignore (Van Zanten and van Tulder, 2020; Ottersen and Engebretsen, 2020), and emphasises the fundamental role of private actors in the pursuit of sustainable development (Heggen et al., 2020). In other terms, with the right actions, the COVID-19 pandemic can mark the rebirth of society as we know it today to one where we protect present and future generations. However, COVID-19 requires rethinking the SDGs framework, in order to make it appropriate for the post-pandemic age (Santos-Carrillo, 2020). Indeed, COVID-19 is demonstrating that sustainable pathways as currently conceived are not resilient to such global stressors (Naidoo and Fisher, 2020). From this perspective, COVID-19 presents a “reset moment for the world” (da Cruz et al., 2020, p. 2), or, similarly, “a stress test for the SDGs” (van Zanten and van Tulder, 2020, p. 453).

Inevitably, COVID-19 has also significant implications for business sustainability. Schaltegger (2021) contends that COVID-19 has emphasised the need for sustainability transformations on the part of companies to achieve more resilient businesses and defeat future pandemics. In this sense, COVID-19 can be also a source of sustainability learnings and opportunities, and not only threats, for business contribution to the SDGs (Hörisch, 2021).

To broaden our understanding of the relation of COVID-19 to business sustainability and underscore the potential of the pandemic to induce transformations for more sustainable businesses, our study investigates how companies have revised and rethought their engagement for the SDGs in times of COVID-19.

Our empirical analysis moves from existing literature suggesting three key perspectives about business sustainability dynamics during a crisis, which are presented in the following section.

2.3 Corporate sustainability in times of crisis

From a management research perspective, an organisational crisis is generally defined as:

A low-probability, high-impact event that threatens the viability of the organisation and is characterized by ambiguity of cause, effect, and means of resolution, as well as by a belief that decisions must be made swiftly (Pearson and Clair, 1998, p. 60).

Management scholars have largely explored how companies respond to crises, suggesting that a crisis may stimulate either organisational adaptive change or rigidity and defiant resistance (Sarkar and Osiyevskyy, 2018).

To theoretically inform our analysis and interpret our empirical findings, we refer to existing literature dealing with how business sustainability relates to external crises (i.e. human/social/technical/economic crises that arise outside organisations). Reviewing prior studies, we categorise the nature of the relationship between sustainability and crisis into three strands:

1. Sustainability for braving crisis, which interprets business sustainability as a tool to help wider societies in times of crisis;

2. Sustainability for capitalising on crisis, which suggests that business sustainability contributes to firms’ financial performance in times of crisis; and

3. Sustainability for surviving crisis, which frames crises as impediments or constraints for business sustainability.

As discussed in the following, these approaches offer alternative perspectives to understand how a firm’s engagement for the SDGs may be rethought and revised in a time of crisis, in terms of 1) the underlying purposes (Why); 2) the mechanisms of implementation (How); and 3) the specific actions for the SDGs (What). Table 1 provides a summary of the main features of the three perspectives.

3.1 Sample selection

We adopted a purposive sampling approach because it is suitable for the selection of information-rich cases to gain an in-depth understanding of a specific phenomenon (Patton, 2002).

To build our sample we considered the following criteria. First, we chose Italy as our research setting because it was one of the worst affected countries in the world and the first European country severely hit by the COVID-19 pandemic [3]. Second, only listed companies were selected because, in comparison with private organisations, they face more pressure and have more resources for contributing to the SDGs. Third, we only included companies that published a Sustainability Report (or a “Non-Financial Declaration”) and that explicitly declared to pursue the SDGs during the COVID-19 pandemic. These companies may be considered leaders in corporate sustainability and the pursuit of the SDGs, certainly ahead of peers not engaged in sustainability reporting and not declaring their commitment to the UN Agenda 2030.

Following these criteria, we first identified the top 100 largest Italian firms by market capitalization listed on the Milan Stock Exchange. Subsequently, we excluded those without an explicit commitment towards the achievement of the SDGs in their 2020 sustainability report. By doing so, we obtained 76 firms. Then, we looked for potential interviewees. From the companies’ websites, we identified sustainability managers and then contacted them proposing an online interview. When the name or the contact of a firm’s sustainability manager was not publicly available, we contacted the Sustainability Office. On our screened sample of 76 companies, 16 sustainability managers or specialists (belonging to 16 different companies) accepted to participate in the study [4]. The acceptance rate is equal to 21.05%. We considered the number of interviewees to be reasonable since it is in line with previous studies on business sustainability (Farooq et al., 2021; Roy et al., 2021; Zhao and Patten, 2016).

3.2 Data collection

To tease out relevant data about firms’ SDGs engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic, we rely on semi-structured interviews and sustainability reports, consistently with previous studies on corporate sustainability (Farooq et al., 2021; Roy et al., 2021; Hossain et al., 2017).

Semi-structured interviews (Yin, 2017) are deemed highly appropriate to collect data and information in complex studies and in research contexts where data are understandable only through direct conversations with the people involved. In addition to that, semi-structured interviews give the interviewee the chance to provide details, ideas and concepts that are not considered by researchers in the preparation of the interview protocol. Furthermore, the interview is a widely accepted technique in the corporate sustainability field (Farooq et al., 2021; Kumar et al., 2021).

Our interviews were based on an interview protocol, which was designed to help the interviewer and encourage participants to focus on the scope of this research. Before conducting the interview, we clarified the purpose of our research and specified that all interviews would be confidential and that no individuals’ or companies’ names would be mentioned in the report. We followed the same procedure for all interviews.

Our interview protocol included a set of questions aimed at understanding how firms’ SDGs engagement has been reshaped in times of COVID-19. Inspired by our theoretical framework, the interview protocol was structured into three main parts, which reflect the building blocks of a firm’s approach to sustainability in times of crisis, as discussed in Section 2.3 (i.e. the “Why”, “How” and “What”). Supplementary Table 1 illustrates how the interview protocol was structured and the questions submitted in the interviews.

After some preliminary and introductive questions to gain a general overview of the firm’s engagement with the SDGs and the impact of COVID-19, the first section asks for COVID-19’s impact on motivations and awareness in relation to corporate contribution to the SDGs. The second section deals with the rethinking and reshaping of how the SDGs are implemented and managed within the organisation, in terms of financial and human resources, stakeholder engagement, sustainability governance and decision-making process. The final section focuses on revisions associated with specific initiatives and actions, asking for transformation in terms of SDGs identification, priorities, trade-offs and targeted actions.

To test our protocol, and identify potential ambiguities and unnecessary questions, we conducted a pilot study with a company outside our sample, which confirmed the clarity and validity of the protocol.

All the interviews were conducted online, using video conference platforms, from April 2021 to January 2022. At least two members of the research team participated in each interview. The length of the interviews ranged approximately from 30 min to 1 h (the average length was 45 min). All interviews were recorded, after asking for the explicit consent of the interviewee/s. The tapes were subsequently transcribed and carefully read by the research team. Table 2 provides a summary of the characteristics of the 16 interviews.

Second, and subsequently, to supplement the interview data and ensure reliability and triangulation of the observed phenomenon, we gathered data, information and insights on corporate SDG practices during COVID-19 from companies’ sustainability reports published in 2021, covering the 2020 financial year. The sustainability reports were used to support the understanding of the interviewees’ statements. In some cases, the interviewee referred to the sustainability report to gain more details on a particular topic under discussion. The sampled companies exhibited a high degree of uniformity in terms of sustainability reporting standards (i.e. the GRI standards). As expected, all the sustainability reports include specific information about the effects of COVID-19 on the SDGs (see Supplementary Table 2).

3.3 Data analysis

Consistent with previous studies in the field (e.g. Robertson and Samy, 2020; Farooq et al., 2021), we conducted a thematic analysis of interview transcripts and firms’ sustainability reports. Thematic analysis is a foundational method “for identifying, analysing and reporting patterns (themes) within data” (Braun and Clarke, 2006, p. 79).

Our thematic analysis followed an inductive, data-driven approach: we explore our whole data set looking for the occurrence and recurrence of themes relating to our research question (i.e. themes capturing firms’ reshaping of SDGs implementation in times of COVID-19), without using a pre-existing coding framework.

Our thematic analysis involved the following steps (Saunders et al., 2016):

• Data familiarisation. This phase consisted of a process of immersion with interview transcripts and sustainability reports to develop familiarity with our data and be able to engage in the analytical procedures which follow. The authors analysed any single passage of the transcribed interviews to interpret the nature of the phenomenon under investigation.

• Data coding. This phase involved labelling each relevant unit of data, which, depending on the specific instances, comprises whole sentences or complete paragraphs, with a code that symbolises or summarises that extract’s meanings. Through coding, we rearranged our original data in a more manageable and meaningful form (Braun and Clarke, 2006). Since our coding process was mainly inductive, we coded all the units of data that capture every possible nuance referring to the revisions of firms’ SDGs engagement in times of COVID-19. At the end of this phase, we obtained 25 codes. Data were coded independently by the three authors to grasp all relevant content. To ensure consistency, all the codes were reviewed by the entire research team. All the coded sentences and paragraphs were tracked and collated into a separate file.

• Searching for themes. This analysis required searching for common and recurring patterns and relationships in our 25 codes to develop a shorter list of themes that relate to our research question. A theme is “a broad category incorporating several codes that appear to be related to one another which indicates an idea that is important to the research question” (Saunders et al., 2016, p. 585). Through strict textual analysis, we collapsed and grouped our 25 codes into 6 precise and rigorous themes which are meaningful for our research question (see Figure 1). These themes represent broad areas of firms’ engagement with the SDGs which have been rethought and revised in times of COVID-19. Building on our theoretical framework, we classified these themes as reflecting changes and re-shaping at the level of underlying purposes (Why), implementation mechanisms (How) and specific initiatives and actions (What), which characterised business engagement for the SDGs during COVID-19.

4.1 Underlying purpose

We find that most of the companies under analysis show a transformation in the underlying purpose of their SDGs engagement. This was determined by growing awareness about the role of companies for the SDGs and a reinforcement of the ethical rationale.

The growing awareness of companies and stakeholders about the relevance of the SDGs (Yamane and Kaneko, 2021) has received large attention in the literature, as a precondition to identify the roles and capabilities of these actors for the accomplishment of the UN Agenda 2030 (Pizzi et al., 2020).

The majority of the sampled companies identified that the years of living with COVID-19 have seen an increase in general awareness about the urgency to address sustainability challenges and the compelling need for more serious and rigorous compliance with the SDGs to hope for a better future.

“The pandemic has affected everyone, people first; this allows us to reflect upon the environmental and societal priorities that were not taken into account before it” (SM9). Significantly, many interviewees point out that COVID-19 has greatly increased:

Our consciousness on seemingly apparent distant phenomena which rapidly affected our lives. The pandemic has shown us evidence of the fact that certain global trends are closer than we expect. Wuhan is distant more than 8,600 km from Italy, but COVID-19 expanded globally and quickly, by letting us understand that we live in an interconnected world. Similarly, this can be translated to climate change because if I emit a ton of CO2 here, I will negatively affect other parts of the world like China – the epicentre of the pandemic’s start –, as a virus in China has affected all of us here too (SM1).

In this sense, COVID-19 has not only amplified the global interconnections, but it has also revealed the deep interconnections between economic, social and environmental issues – and, then, between different SDGs – which is a key aspect to be recognized to accomplish the UN Agenda 2030 (Fiandrino et al., 2022):

Destroying the environment means destroying our natural ecosystem and biodiversity with severe effects on people’s health. The well-being of the planet and the well-being of the people are strongly interconnected and intertwined, that is, ruining the planet destroys the well-being of our life consequently. If we want to ensure health, we must consider what is happening in the world and therefore make broader reflections on the consequences of our actions (SM10).

Furthermore, many companies recognise how COVID-19 has further emphasized the key role of companies in the SDGs realisation, especially those more related to a firm’s core business. For instance, a CSR manager working in a company operating in the energy sector points out that:

We produce energy, and we address integrated water cycle management, waste management, electricity and gas sales, sustainable mobility services, and energy efficiency services for buildings. Companies like us have been aware of their vital role in the country as responsible actors for a long time and the pandemic has emphasized this role with much more evidence. If we want to move toward a logic of sustainable energy transition, we have to start to produce energy in a different way (SM3).

In sum, the pandemic has reinvigorated the awareness about the urgency to address sustainability challenges, the SDGs, and their deep interconnections, and has reinforced the conviction that to achieve a more sustainable future “companies have to do their part collaboratively, you cannot just leave sustainability challenges to others, like central governments; the responsibility is common” (SM6).

Furthermore, our results indicate motivations behind firms’ SDGs engagement (Heras-Saizarbitoria et al., 2022) as the second area of rethinking in times of COVID-19. In particular, we found that the pandemic has emphasized the moral rationale behind firms acting for the SDGs, above and beyond the financial and regulatory forces which typically drive corporate sustainability efforts (Schaltegger and Burritt, 2018):

Our first goal is anchored to “doing good for others”, then, there are reasons that pushed us in pursuit of the SDGs: these reasons include the increasing attention of the regulators, investors and generally, the financial community who considered our better competitive positioning, greater investments, and acquisition of new talents. However, I would say that the weight of the ethical dimension with respect to instrumental motivations has increased (SM1).

This growing perception of firms having a moral responsibility to act for the betterment of society was also driven by the shutdown of non-essential services, so that companies operating in essential public services – such as electricity, gas, water and waste – recognised their unique role and their “moral obligation to keep our country alive, hospitals, essential businesses, houses” (SM12, SM3).

In sum, during the pandemic companies have further acknowledged the ethical rationale for their SDGs engagement, which has increasingly driven them to act for the betterment of society and the environment even in hard times. This change, which is consistent with previous studies on the relevance of ethical values as determinants of corporate contribution to the SDGs (Santos and Silva Bastos, 2020; Ahmed et al., 2021), has opened a window of opportunities for further revisions in firms’ SDGs engagement, as presented in the following sections.

4.2 Implementation mechanisms

Implementation mechanisms for the SDGs is another area of major transformations during the pandemic that we observed in the companies under analysis, in particular at the level of corporate governance, organisational structure and stakeholder dialogue.

Internal corporate governance mechanisms, like the presence of the sustainability committee and the implementation of sustainability-based compensation policies, are determining factors in firms’ addressing sustainability challenges (Naciti et al., 2022) and targeting the SDGs (Adu et al., 2022; Martínez-Ferrero and García-Meca, 2020). Our findings reveal that these mechanisms have been significantly revised and reinforced in COVID-19 time. For instance, an interviewee reported the creation of a sustainability committee in times of COVID-19:

Before the pandemic, I was used to work by myself on isolated projects on the environment and for the local communities. Now, COVID-19 still circulates all over the world, however, my job has completely reformed, because I am working under the board of directors, with specific reference to a new sustainability committee with strong sustainability inputs. The most important change was the setting up of a real sustainability committee (SM13).

In addition, some companies implemented a sustainable-based compensation policy for the first time (SM10, SM1, SM9), with the purpose to encourage top managers to reuse certain corporate activities in line with the SDGs in the post-pandemic world.

Other companies revised their organisational structure by assigning a central-team oversight to sustainability. Interestingly, during COVID-19, many companies have increased their efforts to “practice sustainability and the SDGs with an interconnected mindset to all areas of business activity” (SM10). Therefore, a group of companies (SM8, SM2, SM6) reorganised their sustainability department, to strengthen its role of connection with all the other business activities, considering the overall strategy of the group. For instance, SM1 stated that: “Today, we have revised the department “Investor Relations” by renaming it “Investor Relations and Sustainability”. This means that sustainability has achieved a more explicit acknowledgment. Moreover, the former Risk Control Committee becomes the “Risk control committee and sustainability. The sustainability department starts projects of its own and collaborates with other departments and business units, because sustainability is not an isolated competency, like marketing, but affects multiple functions and has impacts on the overall organization”. This implied hiring new people with specific sustainability skills and abilities (SM5, SM1, SM8, SM13, SM2). For instance, SM13 stated that:

Our office literally exploded in a month and a half from November 2021 to the end of December 2021. There was an investment in human resources which allowed us to have a very high quality in sustainability-related projects. Now with the explosion of our office we aim to give more and more positive and rapid responses to the Board of Directors, the sustainability committee and stakeholders. If the territory requires a particular intervention, we want to be ready and with more and more quality than in the past.

This allowed sustainability managers to engage in new activities such as the adoption of a new sustainability plan with specific goals and targets (SM1, SM10), addressing an alignment with the SDGs targets (SM8, SM2, SM5, SM14).

In sum, our findings indicate that during the pandemic companies have strengthened their internal corporate governance mechanisms and their organisational structure to engage in sustainable business practices and enhance organisational legitimacy for braving the crisis. As a matter of fact, interviewees acknowledged that sustainability implies cross-functional decisions and is a strategic and operational imperative to drive further contributions to the SDGs.

Companies have also further addressed dedicated tasks related to managing stakeholders. The majority of our sampled companies point out that they intensified the interaction with stakeholders during the pandemic, especially as a channel to capture and understand the most urgent sustainability challenges and, then, develop solutions that help both companies and stakeholders cope with the changes in the business and social environment. Our findings corroborate the central role of stakeholder engagement in firms’ commitment to the SDGs (Santos and Silva Bastos, 2020; López-Concepción et al., 2022).

For instance, SM3 states that during the pandemic:

We continued to listen to stakeholders in order to give concrete and immediate support to families and other businesses. We acted even before the intervention of the regulatory bodies. This was possible thanks to the continuous discussions and interactions with stakeholders.

For other companies, stakeholder dialogue was essential to frame sustainability issues linked to the SDGs in the sustainability matrix (SM8).

For a few companies, the pandemic was a way to introduce and develop new strategies for stakeholder interaction. SM5 notes that:

Before the pandemic there was no communication channel. Now we are opening ourselves to our stakeholders to dialoguing with and learning from them, we are convinced that this change will be beneficial for both us and them (SM5).

However, stakeholder dialogue had to be adapted and remodelled in times of COVID-19. In particular, to cope with lockdowns and social distancing measures, companies developed innovative solutions, making use of digital tools such as online multi-stakeholder focus groups (SM1, SM16) and virtual stakeholder forums (SM5), online participatory dialogue and planning (SM3) and video conferencing (SM2, SM12). The digitalization of stakeholder relationships involved replacing in-person meetings with online meetings and conferences, which allowed companies to reach a larger stakeholder network and receive instant feedback (SM6, SM16), and keep stakeholders updated on the evolution of the companies’ consequent strategies (SR2, SR6, SR12).

Overall, these findings reveal a deep enhancement of firms’ human closeness to stakeholder needs during the time of the pandemic (Crane and Matten, 2021).

4.3 Actions

Finally, we find that significant transformations occurred at the level of actions for the SDGs. This was evident from transformations in both the prioritisation and identification of SDGs and in the specific SDG-related projects and initiatives carried out during the pandemic.

With regard to the process of identification and prioritisation of Goals (Ike et al., 2019), previous literature highlights how during the pandemic certain sustainability issues were more significantly impacted than others, creating the basis to rethink the role and actions of all actors involved (Ranjbari et al., 2021).

In this sense, our most evident finding is that companies have strengthened their involvement in the achievement of Goals related to social sustainability. Indeed, they point out that:

The SDGs related to health and security have been at our primary attention during the pandemic and actions related to access to medicines, training of medical personnel were at the center of our commitment (SM10).

This was attributed to the fact that:

The pandemic has hit the business, but the business is made up of people. Companies have realised that human capital is fundamental, beyond profits and losses. We have now different attention to our employees (SM9).

In particular, companies highlighted an increased commitment to SDG 3 (health and wellbeing) and SDG 10 (diversity inclusion and equal opportunities) (SM4, SM7). Therefore, greater attention has been devoted to people and human capital (SM5) and employees’ and customers’ health and well-being become a priority (SM16, SM14, SM11). Furthermore, commitment to the local context (see SDG 11) has also been intensified. For instance, the manager of an oil and gas company states that:

Our company is a driving force, both economically and societal, for territory. Covid has pushed us to channel most of the investments in projects for supporting the health care system and the local territory (SM12).

In this sense, as a way to support the local community, some companies enhanced their commitments towards SDG 4 related to education. For instance, SM14 notes that: “we have included SDG 4 on training and education, especially on sustainable development. This has two implications: both on the event and the training of people”.

The majority of companies were also able to continue to act for those SDGs that were already targeted before the pandemic (e.g. SM1, SM5, SM4). For instance, a CSR manager working for an energy transmission grid states that “We did not give up on pursuing our targeted SDGs” (SM2). In this sense, COVID-19 “has confirmed the goodness of the path started and pushed to accelerate it” (SM3). As another interviewee points out, “the pandemic outbreak did not lead us to rearrange our SDG commitment because we were already focused on the massive integration of sustainability into our core business” (SM4). Hence, for these companies “the pandemic has accelerated and intensified the commitment to pursue SDGs” (SM2).

These companies remark that their environmental commitment has not been constrained during the pandemic. For instance, SM3 firmly states that:

At the end of 2019, we identified some future development plans like decarbonisation, circular economy, development of resilient cities. Given the crisis context, we have accelerated processes linked to SDG 6 and SDG 14 and we have strengthened SDG 12 and SDG 13 as regards the recovery of the waste.

On the other hand, a few companies complain that the pandemic has limited the level of their overall commitment to the SDGs. For instance, SM14 notes that: “with regard to SDG 16, I can confirm that Covid has limited us because we did not pursue that goal. So, Covid has limited us a little bit”. Therefore, in the case of these companies, we observe a refocus in the SGDs’ engagement, where resources were transferred to commitment with more urgent social issues.

A final aspect where most companies recognize a revision in their SDGs engagement in times of pandemic deals with the development of specific SDG-related projects and initiatives, which were mainly targeted at addressing the impact of COVID-19 on sustainability challenges (Ahmed et al., 2021; García-Sánchez and García-Sánchez, 2020).

In particular, during the pandemic, corporate actions targeting SDG 3 were mainly focused on donating face masks, medical supplies, hand sanitizers and other goods to local hospitals and other associations involved in fighting COVID-19. For instance, in 2020, a healthcare company increased the number of healthcare donations up to €5.4m (equal to approximately 70% of the total donations made in 2020) and 18% was allocated to activities aimed at treating rare diseases, while the remaining 12% refers to contributions and donations awarded to social and cultural organisations and institutions in various countries (SR10). The CSR manager of a company that bought €270.000 of machinery and medical equipment points out the difference between goods and cash contributions:

We took actions in purchasing urgent goods and we directly gave them to the structures where they were needed. I really care about this aspect because it was not a mere bank transfer. We had to search for the machinery because there were few of them around the world (SM11).

Corporate contributions were also extended to the larger community: SM4 donated €2.6m to associations giving food to vulnerable people, while SM16 converted a space into a vaccination hub for the local community.

Furthermore, almost all companies have implemented specific actions to ensure employees’ health and well-being during the pandemic. In particular, companies not only introduced or strengthened remote working (partially mandated by law), but they also provided their employees with education training and webinars dealing with wellbeing, inclusive leadership and engagement, and maintaining human relationships with colleagues (SM4, SM2, SM16).

Particular attention was also paid to the health of all stakeholders operating along the supply chain. For instance, SM10 declared that:

We have also collaborated with suppliers to promote best practices on prevention, to continue our production safely. A stock warehouse with automated control has been created to have the raw materials available. There has been an impact on the relationships with our supply chain because we wanted to guarantee health and safety.

To protect its consumers, a company operating in the financial sector increased its:

Communication on the use of social channels, information on market trends and investment management, site restyling with a focus on multi-channel and digital security, suspension of all advertising campaigns not in line with the particular emergency and a review of some processes to allow telematics management of services and products (SM4).

With regard to SDG 4, specific actions were carried out to support the quality of children's education, dramatically threatened by the pandemic. For instance, SM10 notes that the company donated personal computers for the distance learning of children because:

The pandemic has also had heavy repercussions on schooling. The possibility of having a device in order to participate in distance learning was a problem that affected many students and their families. To this end, the Group has donated over 250 refurbished and fully functional computers to children who were in need of them (SR10).

Other companies developed specific activities for students:

To increase their awareness of addictive gambling which has increased during the pandemic. The core issue here is financial literacy which is at my heart because it is our responsibility to educate future generations capable of making conscious choices about their investments (SM13).

Overall, companies have demonstrated virtuous and proactive responses in developing and implementing specific actions to address the challenges that COVID-19 has posed to the accomplishment of many SDGs.