Managing corporate sustainability (CS) involves the consideration of the economic, environmental and social impacts of business activities. Successful sustainability management requires detailed measurement of corporate operations including corporate social responsibility (CSR) towards sustainable development. This research explored corporate sustainability, in two phases, with the development of a holistic sustainability framework to measure sustainability performance.  This empirical study also explored the linkages between CSR and employee engagement, by comparing the sustainability of companies in the UK and Sri Lanka. The operations of corporate organisations measured via a new ‘7E’ model to benchmark sustainability performance enabled comparison between companies with a dashboard of sustainability scores. The 7E model measured corporate sustainability performance through seven variables: economic, environment, expertise, energy, ethics, empathy and executive, incorporating a range of operational indicators.  Mixed methods of data collection including company surveys, data sheets, interviews with management and employee surveys provided insights into how companies were applying sustainability practices towards reducing environmental impacts and contributing to the wellbeing of employees and communities. The outputs of this research provided corporate sustainability assessments and details of sustainability performance for four companies in the tea sector (phase one) and forty companies in varied industry sectors(phase two) in two countries,  including employee attitudes to CSR and environmental practices supporting sustainable development. The findings show that companies with strong company sustainability performance and developed social impact and CSR activities, have employees with higher engagement at work and valued community engagement. Responses from 1146 employee surveys, analysed using principal component analysis (PCA) and the two-step cluster method show that the most engaged employees exhibited ‘shared value’ characteristics aligned with corporate engagement and social outreach. The companies with better sustainability performance had a larger number of engaged employees, showing a positive link between company sustainability and employee engagement.

The 7E model developed for this project, and tested through this empirical study, provides a methodology to benchmark sustainability performance enabling comparison between companies and countries. The findings contribute to research on sustainability measurement and provide insights on sustainability from corporate and employee perspectives. Four case studies in the tea sector in phase one of the study, provided valuable insights on sustainability from Sri Lanka, a developing economy with the lowest paid workers in the tea supply chain. Phase two of this research applied the 7E model to sustainability measurement in various industry sectors including 40 large companies and SMEs that demonstrated the versatility of the model for use as a tool for sustainability management in any industry sector and size of company. The model can support SMEs that find the use of existing sustainability frameworks complex and resource intensive. Further insights from the research include analyses of corporate approaches towards materials management and actions on decarbonisation for a net zero transition. The use of the 7E model as a sustainability framework for CS measurement, combined with the insights on CSR and employee engagement can contribute to sustainable development through measurement and management of CS. The results also show that this study constitutes a significant contribution to science, providing a comparison of sustainability approaches in developing and developed economies and insights on approaches to corporate sustainability management including CSR. The 7E model developed here delivers a practical methodology for benchmarking sustainability performance and managing corporate sustainability.