Making your business sustainable and meaningful
Corporate social responsibility should reflect what you offer your customers and employees
When setting up a small business, there’s so much to think (and worry) about — not the least of which is whether it will get off the ground. At the outset, it may seem impossible to integrate corporate social responsibility (CSR) into your business plan.
“There’s a huge scale of where companies can be on corporate social responsibility,” says Toronto-based consultant Carissa MacLennan, who calls herself a strategist for transformative good.
MacLennan believes businesses can choose how to incorporate social values or environmental sustainability into their model based on the nature of their work.
She points out there are myriad benefits to including CSR in a business plan.
In 2013, an MIT Sloan Management Re- view report showed 59 per cent of businesses that integrated sustainability across three out of four of their business elements reported seeing profits.
Back in May, an MIT Sloan Management Review report showed that 75 per cent of senior executives at investment firms agree that a company’s good sustainability performance “is materially important when making investment decisions,” while the same percentage cited improved revenue performance and operational efficiency from sustainability as strong reasons to invest.
And a Nielson report from 2015 found that 66 per cent of online consumers said they were willing to pay more for products and services from sustainable brands, up from 55 per cent the year before and 50 per cent in 2013.
Those consumers are typically vocal on social media platforms, MacLennan says, which could translate into free advertising for a small business “that probably doesn’t have a large marketing department.”
And integrating CSR into the model can help with hiring. The majority of respondents to a 2012 study by Net Impact identified having a job with a positive impact as an important life goal. And, 65 per cent of college students said they wanted to make a positive social or environmental impact in their work. The founders of the food delivery service Feast know all about the benefits of integrating CSR, which they did from the get-go.
“At the founding root of what we wanted to create was something that was going to be based on some great principles in terms of doing well both as a good corporate citizen to the environment and to the business community at large, as well as to our own employees, too,” says Feast’s chief marketing officer, Paul Cowan.
Once they determined those guiding principles, they settled on best practices to fulfil them, particularly environmental sustainability (the food is served in compostable or re- cyclable packaging, delivered on bikes or in electric cars and the ingredients are locally sourced); and the treatment of staff. They are also provided with meals after shifts. Kitchen staff enjoys more consistent nine-tofive work days, which are uncommon in the hospitality industry, giving them “great work-life balance,” Cowan adds.
If purchasing electric vehicles for their delivery fleet was a little costlier, Cowan says, rebates under the province’s Electric Vehicle Incentive Program (EVIP) — which pays thousands of dollars to individuals and companies that purchase electric vehicles — helped ease that burden, as does the ongoing exposure and attention that is generated by the company’s practices.
People stop delivery personnel in the street asking about the BMW i3 car or the Dutch cargo bike with custom boxes, which gets them talking about Feast, and spreads the word about the company and its mandate, making the fleet “quite literally moving billboards,” Cowan says.
“There’s an absolute trend in the market where people are looking to support local, they are looking at being able to work with companies that have a much more trusted and reli- able supply chain network in place,” he adds.
While it’s ideal for a company to integrate CSR from day one, it doesn’t always happen that way, notes Kernaghan Webb, founding director of the Institute for the Study of Corporate Social Responsibility and an associate professor of law at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University.
He cites the example of the Body Shop, which started as a small cosmetics business with a founding principle that products would not be tested on animals. As her business grew, founder Anita Roddick added other principles, including ingredients be harvested in environmentally sustainable ways, and that workers, particularly women who were harvesting ingredients or making products, be paid and treated fairly.
This method is laudable, Webb says, “because you don’t get overwhelmed by all the possible things that you could be doing from the beginning. Instead, in an intuitive way you end up handling things in the priority that they appear before you.”
On whatever timeline CSR is factored into a business plan, Webb says, the key is to have a product or service that people want to pay for.