Seven Questions to Ask Yourselves on Social Impact
- How quickly do you pay your suppliers?
- What % of your staff think you are a great place to work?
- How many of your senior management work less than a 5 day week or work flexibly?
- Is your company carbon-neutral?
- How many of your job advertisements include a generic 'degree required'?
- How quickly can customers get through to a real person on the phone?
- What proportion of your staff understand and practice social responsibility?
These are not the only issues in social responsibility. However each one is important and make the point that social responsibility is not just about how much you give to the community.
Thinking Behind the Seven Questions
The greatest impact that most businesses have on their community is through their suppliers and their staff. So:
- Do you have a policy that small businesses are paid quickly - preferably within 14 days?
- Do you carry out an anonymous survey of all staff to find out if they think it's a great place to work?
- If the message is that you can't get to be in senior management without working a full week or longer, then any stated commitment to flexibility isn't going to have much effect. And I'm willing to bet that if you answered 'No', your company under-represents women at senior levels.
- Do you measure your emissions? This isn't just for manufacturers - how many flights do your staff take? Becoming carbon-neutral is generally about investing in forests to counter the effects of your use.
- Has your company spotted the contradiction between requiring degrees for white collar recruitment and seeking to increase its diversity? Afro-Caribbeans, the disabled and the working class are all hugely under-represented in our universities. So practicing a degree-only policy is simply practicing discrimination.
And why this insistence on degrees? Certain jobs require specific degrees (I wouldn't want a doctor, for instance, who didn't have a medical degree.) But insisting on a generic 'degree required' is more about saying 'we want people like us, who have been through similar experiences'. Some of the most valuable and most senior people at Happy have never been near a university.
Why would you want to practice a recruitment policy that would prevent Bill Gates or Richard Branson from applying?
- Yes, customers are part of your impact. Part of social responsibility is about customer service. If it takes 15 minutes to get through, I don't believe you are taking this subject seriously.
- So you've agreed clear social responsibility policies and published them on your web site. How certain are you that all your staff know what this means in terms of their day-to-day actions?
