Becoming socially responsible is not typically an attractive concept for some businesses, especially those whose focus is on earning profits. However, for companies and organizations working towards a more worthy cause, social responsibility is still a great way to generate profit to survive.
In fact, it can welcome tons of different opportunities for one’s business. Social responsibility can help expand your potential target market size, extend exclusivity of offers, boost customer advocacy in all markets, and improve team productivity and motivation. Interested in improving your business’ social responsibility efforts? The tips here can help you with that!
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Create an appropriate social mission
Before you could even start creating and carrying out social actions, you should first have a social mission that aligns with your company’s goals. Doing will make it easier for you to plan and execute social responsibility efforts. At the same time, this prevents greenwashing, wherein a company only supports a community or gets into the volunteering act for PR. To have a better on what social mission to pursue, you can check what other companies have. You can even collaborate with them to increase the impact.
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Work with your entire team
As with any business culture, working as a team is necessary. After all, you can’t possibly live out your mission if your employees are not aware of their part and are not participating. To boost your social responsibility, seasoned business owners recommend involving everyone in the organization to participate from the decision-making process to the implementation. For instance, you can assign teams to choose which charities you will make weekly or monthly donations on.
This will give your people a greater sense of responsibility and purpose and make them passionate about giving back to the community. You can create and release regular company memos and meetings to familiarize your people and encourage them to get involved with the cause.
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Build strong business infrastructure
A socially responsible business knows how to take care of its services and systems. After all, you can fully function without them or even earn enough profit. To avoid putting your business name in the grave of costly and reputational damage, it’s always best to implement regular monitoring and maintenance of your IT infrastructure. If you don’t have an in-house team who can handle this, you can always acquire an SQL server performance monitor from experienced IT companies.
While this action might cost you money, establishing a strong IT infrastructure will help you run your business in a profitable and socially responsible way. Unsecure IT systems can make you vulnerable to cyber-attacks and lead to various problems such as loss of clients’ data or financial statements.
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Create a dedicated in-house team
It is also a smart move to organize a dedicated team that will manage or supervise your social responsibility efforts and activities. Doing so will make it easy for you to establish a more positive impact on society while still allowing other important business procedures to function well.
A good social responsibility group should create and implement realistic tasks, release public awareness and internal campaigns, and work with the allocated resources. They should also inform you about the performance of your social responsibility strategy, determining what actions are working and what are not. And of course, they should be passionate about helping others too!
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Consider pursuing environmental initiatives
While environmental issues are not typically seen as an immediate community concern, it is still a serious problem to focus on. These days, companies and organizations are encouraged to take responsible action towards limiting their impact on the environment. Leverage your social responsibility efforts by considering sustainability at the same time. Some common sustainability practices include implementing eco-friendly lighting, working in a paperless environment, using renewable clean energy and water-efficient fixtures, and promoting carpooling.
Besides that, there are also tons of recycling programs out there that you can participate in. In this way, you won’t have to put effort and money into developing an in-house program for recycling. Some recyclable products include office supplies, paper products, monitors and computers, electronics, and fluorescent light bulbs.
Following these simple steps can drastically help you become a socially responsible business that can truly make a difference. Let your business become an effective instrument to improve society, and for sure, more customers and clients will see that as a competitive end choose you over others.
