Financial value must not be the only recognised metric of business success

Anna Scott

The charity Business in the Community has called on company leaders to reward responsible behaviour among their employees in the same way they would reward financial performance.

Corporate social responsibility reports and ‘values’ statements have nothing on actually incentivising and rewarding ‘doing the right thing’, says BITC’s CEO Stephen Howard. 

What does this actually mean in practice? According to Howard some practical ways of ‘integrating responsibility into the DNA’ of businesses include making responsible behaviour a central element of staff training, and giving staff experiences outside of their businesses. 

Leadership research conducted by the BITC suggests that behaviour that goes against an organisation’s values is the result of individual employee objectives not aligning with company corporate responsibility goals.

Most progressive business leaders know now the importance of recognising the greater social purpose their organisations have, other than just turning profits. 

The PR fallout from corporate scandals in the last decade is sufficiently terrifying for companies to at least pay lip service to behaving responsibly.

But CEOs increasingly recognise that the vast choice available to consumers and the proliferation of information about their organisation made possible by social media means consumers can and do desert them in droves. So too can potentially highly-skilled employees, who are increasingly interested in employer brand when they are looking for a job.

The financial impact of not incorporating a sense of responsibility across all business practices is clear.

Pulling companies up on their supply chains, environmental practices and behaviour towards employees and consumers is no longer an agenda of the Left only. Expecting and demanding responsible behaviour by companies is very much a mainstream point of view now.

Whether and how companies choose to adopt the BITC’s suggestions remains to be seen.

Social recognition programmes offer ways for organisations to publicly recognise employees’ responsible behaviour, and do not have to cost a great deal.

And in a period in which UK employees have seen frozen pay for a number of years and bonuses tend to have negative connotations whatever sector they are awarded in, incentivising with pay or benefits for responsible behaviour may be unlikely.

But it will be interesting to see how companies take the next step in their ambitions to be socially responsible.