The Advantages
How Your Social & Environmental Responsibility Can Give You An Edge
Mark Topley CSR coach helps you build a successful purpose driven business through leadership, culture, team engagement, social responsibility.
Does your business give back or feel like it should be? Is your team participating in an annual event to raise money for charity? Are there murmurs within the organisation of wanting to do more or believing the business should be more involved in the community? Do you feel that there’s a disconnect between the team and the feeling of engagement you want to have? Or perhaps you’re wondering how to be better stewards of the environment? Taking a look at your social and environmental responsibility and packaging it into a simple but strong Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategy will give answer to all these questions and more.
I’ll walk you through the steps to get there.
They require some thought and planning but are straightforward for any business wanting to make a difference in their community, strengthen their team, and increase their positive reputation and relationships within the population they serve.
The pillars of Corporate Social Responsibility
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) encompasses three important pillars:
- People – providing strong leadership, looking after and inspiring your team and treating your patients and stakeholders well
- Environment – being environmentally responsible and covering the basics of reduce, reuse, recycle wherever possible
- Contribution - making a positive impact on your community, and to local and international charities through regular support, be it through fundraising, volunteering, donating skills or a combination
These pillars are the foundation of the plan of action that will give your practice an edge.
What the business gets in return
By creating a strategic plan, businesses can expect higher staff retention, greater client loyalty, and a greater impact on the causes they support. In fact, engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave their job. Companies with good staff engagement are 12% more profitable and 18% more productive than competitors. Those are big numbers and big differences that can be made by implementing a CSR plan.
The Campbell Clinic has had elements of CSR in place for many years, but they didn’t have a strategic way of working through their commitments during the year. We worked together to put together a CSR strategy that would bring together all their current commitments and help them to focus on their team and community. Hayley Edwards, Marketing Coordinator at the practice, says that the implementation of their plan has “sparked up conversations with patients and when we hold fundraising activities, patients are always keen to get involved.”
She says that what the practice did previously was great, but their CSR strategy has expanded on this “bringing the team together and allowing us, as a business, to appreciate the work that we do and the difference it can make to our community and team.”
Having a CSR strategy in place does more than connect the team, it can help the business to grow and expand by connecting with patients and stakeholders on a different level.
During the time that Shaenna Loughnane ran the two practices that she and husband Phil Loughnane owned, they supported Bridge2Aid, a dental charity that works in Tanzania. She believes that linking with the charity to raise funds and support dentists and nurses to travel to Tanzania to share their skills helped to create a shared focus and ethos “that enabled us to grow as quickly as we did. Patients could see that our business was different from other practices in the area”
Five steps to get on the right track
When working with clients, I walk them through 5 important steps to create their CSR plan.
- Values – what are the values and mission behind the business. What’s important to the owners, managers and team members?
- Vision - what kind of business do you want to be? Look at where the business is currently compared to where you want to be.
- Commitments – what commitments will the business make through its CSR strategy to its people, the environment, and through its contribution to the community and good causes.
- Plan – The team should be inspired without being overwhelmed so it’s important to create a plan for the activities you’ll do as part of your CSR strategy. As the plan is created, consider busy times in the practice, other commitments and staffing levels. Select the causes that mean something to the business, staff and community. Choose a level of action and activities that is appropriate and reasonable. Create a calendar and identity team members to be responsible for various tasks. And don’t forget to create a review cycle to give yourself the opportunity to evaluate progress and make changes as needed.
- Communicate – Without coming across as though the business is bragging, use the communication channels available to you to share your actions and accomplishments with your community. Think about how to highlight the causes and the team’s involvement in your newsletter, on your social media platforms, and within the practice. It’s also important to keep the team apprised of the successes and the upcoming plans to keep them motivated and engaged in the CSR strategy.
Joe Bhat, director of the Moor Park Specialist Dental Centre, and his team have been working with me to put together their CSR strategy. He says, “we’ve been doing a lot of CSR in our own way over the last few years, but it’s pretty disorganized and chaotic. Mark has helped us put together a direction, with a pathway, putting things in a systematic fashion so that we can deliver our CSR to our community in the best possible way.” By having systems in place and a longer-term commitment to the organisations they support, they will make a bigger impact in their community with less stress on the business and their team.
Extra assistance
Use my 60 Minute CSR Plan to help you get started – it’s available from my website when you join the email update list. It’s a step by step guide to help you look at the five stages in detail and apply them to the business you own or work for in order to maximise the impact that a strong CSR strategy will bring to the practice.
Mark Topley helps dental practices and businesses to unlock the added value for their business from a structured approach to Corporate Social Responsibility. He writes at marktopley.co.uk, and provides free articles and advice on his Facebook or Twitter @Mark_Topley
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