please summarize this paragraph and give the key points

More Structured Attention to Stakeholders Shareholder primacy is the cornerstone of the agency-based model of governance, but if the pandemic has shown anything, it is the importance of each and every stakeholder group to a companys ability to function, let alone thrive and succeed over time. In the face of Covid-19, some companies struggled because their customers disappeared. Others saw their workforce reduced to a skeleton crew of essential employees. Still others grappled with supply chain disruptions, unsustainable debt, or insufficient capital to fund their operations. Since the onset of the crisis, it has become common practice for management to update the board on the situation regarding each stakeholder group, and many boards and senior leaders have declared the health and safety of employees and customers to be their top priority. Some investor groups as well have weighed in on behalf of putting employees first during this perilous time.

The crisis has validated the logic of interdependence behind the Business Roundtables 2019 statement on corporate purpose, in which 181 CEOs pledged a commitment to each of five stakeholder groups customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and shareholders and reversed its endorsement of shareholder primacy. Coming out of the crisis, boards and senior leaders will find it even harder to say that shareholders or, for that matter, any stakeholder group has standing primacy over all the others. The crisis has demonstrated that the primacy of one group or the other cannot be fixed once-and-for-all. In the life of a company, there are times when employee interests must come first, times when customer interests should take priority, times when public need is paramount, and times when the interests of shareholders should be the prime concern. As reactions to Covid-19 showed, much depends on the nature of the interests at issue and the circumstances of the company.

These lessons from Covid-19 imply a more active role for boards in monitoring companies relationships with their core stakeholders. That may mean asking management to continue the Covid-born practice of periodic reporting to the board on the status of each group or, more formally, to establish goals and a reporting process that will allow the board to track the companys performance for its stakeholders more systematically over time. Boards will also want to take a more active role in ensuring that tradeoffs among the interests of its various stakeholders are handled in a way that is consistent with its obligations to these groups and with the long-term health of the company. For that, it will be important for directors to have a shared understanding of the companys purpose and strategy, as well as a framework defining the companys stakeholders and responsibilities to each.

Many companies say they have commitments to all of their stakeholders, and that may well be true. But few boards have a structured process for overseeing those commitments or for tracking the companys performance for its non-shareholder stakeholders. If they do, it is not something that is regularly reviewed and discussed in the boardroom in the way that performance for shareholders is regularly reviewed and discussed. To the extent that stakeholder concerns come into strategy or M&A decisions, it tends to be somewhat ad hoc or by exception rather than a routine part of the analyses that boards receive.

In the wake of Covid-19, boards will likely face increased pressure to incorporate stakeholder perspectives and voices, especially those of employees, into their oversight and decision processes. They will also be challenged to show that the company is performing well for all its stakeholders. External pressure aside, boards that have learned from Covid-19 will want to do this for their own purposes.