Nidžara Osmanagić Bedenik

Sustainability Reporting in Central and Eastern European Companies: Results of an International and Empirical Study

Reporting on corporate social, environmental and economic responsibility has broadened widely within the last decade. The European Union is the most active region in the world in terms of sustainability reporting, largely on a voluntary basis. Most of the empirical research related to sustainability reporting in Europe has been conducted in Western European countries. In Central and Eastern Europe, only a small number of studies have focused on sustainability reporting. Little, however, is known whether how and why companies in CEE report about their corporate sustainable activities. The aim of the research project is to describe the status quo of SR in CEE, to explain some noteworthy differences between the two subsamples CEE and WE and to predict the future development of SR in the CEE region. To address this research issue, we have established a research consortium with researchers from ten Central and Eastern European Countries: Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Two Western European countries, Germany and Austria, have been added to the sample to enable a regional comparison.

Sustainability Reporting in Croatia: The Challenges of Sustainable Business

Sustainability reporting is increasingly becoming an integral part of business reports. It encompasses reporting on environmental-, social-, and employee-related matters, as well as reporting on human rights, anti-corruption, and bribery issues. Implementing the stated principles requires knowledge and poses a challenge for managers.

SUCCESS FACTORS IN CROATIAN HOTEL INDUSTRY

High dynamic and complexity of environment as well as high dynamic and differentiation within a company make success management more complicated than ever. Success factors are subtle instruments which we can influence, at the same time influencing the business success. It is important to explore and understand the success factors of the hotel industry too. In this paper authors investigate the success factors in Croatian high quality hotels, that is four and five stars hotels. Achieving business success depends on many factors and authors will specifically focus on internet as a distribution channel and controlling as an expert management support. In Croatian economy, tourism is one of the most important development factors, because it directly or indirectly creates around 22 % of total domestic product, and more than 40% of total export. Trends of its growth are visible in the number of high quality hotels, which has risen from 64 to 165 since 2007. Tourism industry represents one of the areas in which Internet technology has a significant influence in changing some of the key industry premises. In the hotel industry, combination of human and technological elements can strongly influence competitiveness on the market, the quality of goods and services, decreased distribution costs and improved customer services. Attempting to reach the global consumer in a fierce competition on the market, Croatian hoteliers use internet technology more intensely. Although internet and primarily web sites offer new opportunities to hoteliers, they need to be employed efficiently and effectively, in order to bring about greater business success. Therefore, the first proposition of this paper is that Croatian high quality hotels accepted internet’s potential and use it in striving for greater success as an additional distribution channel. Also, controlling represents a function within a management system which increases its effectiveness and efficiency. So, another proposition of this paper is that companies with controlling achieve greater levels of business success than do companies without controlling, and that by improving controlling as a key measure, companies may directly increase their possibility of business success. In order to find support for stated propositions, evaluation of 165 four and five stars hotels’ websites was performed to evaluate the websites of Croatian high quality hotels and their content. The study results show that management of Croatian high quality hotels is still using Internet technology for presentation purposes only and there is no awareness that website content needs to be managed well. Furthermore, to evaluate the second proposition, authors conducted a comparative overview of hotel companies with and without controlling departments using the basic indicators of liquidity, productivity, economics and profitability. The resulting conclusion is that controlling, in its institutional and functional sense, is to be found in relatively few very successful hotel companies. Ultimately, authors’ findings indicate that both, internet as a distribution channel and controlling, are significant factors of hotels’ business success, but poorly used in Croatian high quality hotels.