How ethical is your business?

“Kindness” might not be the first word you associate with successful business. Indeed, in the era of The Apprentice, you might think kindness is the last quality that will get you anywhere. But growing numbers of businesses are finding that thinking a little more responsibly has bought them unexpected rewards.

Social responsibility covers a number of different areas but essentially involves thinking about how your business, large or small, has an impact on everything around it. You don’t have care much about the environment to see the advantages of saving energy – with energy costs rising all the time, switching lights and computers off can save companies a small fortune.

And what about teambuilding? The idea of sending everyone on a teambuilding exercise may at least unite everybody in your business in hating the idea, but involve an adopted charity and you’ll find the thousands you could have spent on a consultant doing much more good. The Donna Louise Trust have been extremely successful in engaging local companies by offering decorating and gardening days in which businessmen can get away from the boardroom and reconnect over a genuinely valuable activity.

Fundraising, far more than memos, also has the power to unite teams, and payroll giving provides employers a way of supporting tax-efficient philanthropy amongst staff.

Even if you think you have nothing to offer a local charity, least of all money, some creative thinking can unlock the value within your company that can be of much greater help than the small cheque you hand over, begrudgingly. Can you give a local church some surplus but high quality stock to sell? Can you offer your time and skills? Local companies have made films free of charge that can be used for further fundraising and promotion of charities. In return, the charity may be able to create connections for you, helping to raise the profile of your business.

Try this exercise with someone else. List five ways your business could beome more ethical. Then with each of those five, list five ways you could implement the idea. As you go on, your ideas will become more creative. I tried this in a group talking about an organic supermarket, and before we knew it we had ideas for a number of other spin-off enterprises, promotion for the business and ways of involving the local community. It was impressive how much money we could have made and I nearly packed everything up to open my own in Burslem.

It also highlighted how many things the business-owner was already doing ethically that he may not have thought of as being part of a ‘corporate social responsibility’.
With consumers and jobseekers increasingly making decisions based on their trust in a business, it can only do your business good to promote everything you do to improve the world.

Ideas to improve your business’s social standing

• Contact the Business Brokers. They can discuss what you already do and find ways for you to get more involved painlessly in all sorts of community initiatives.

• Contact your favourite charity’s fundraiser with an offer to help somehow if they need it. They’re bound to think of something creative and it will give you a push to get round to doing something

• like the neighbour with the sugar, offer to help new businesses in your area in some way – if they’re successful they will give you business later

• Think about whether your spending choices are benefiting other local businesses, the community and the environment more widely