Integrating Social Responsability (pg 4)

This page’s purpose is to provide guidance on including social responsibility to practice in any kind of organization, whatever its organizational systems, policies, structures or networks are.

To attain this, it is important for the organization to determine its key characteristics relating to social responsibility such as the organization’s type and purpose, location of operations, historical performance, the organization’s workforce and employees, and many more. 

The organization must realize its leadership’s current attitudes, level of commitment and understanding of social responsibility. 

Due Diligence

Due diligence refers to a comprehensive process that identifies actual and potential negative impacts of an organization’s decisions and activities and aims to mitigate those impacts. 

A due diligence process should include at least:

• appropriate actions to address negative impacts
• means of assessing, integrating, and tracking social responsibility performance
• organizational policies related to the core subject

An organization must acknowledge the challenges faced by the harmed individuals or groups to identify areas for action. 

With this, an organization may seek influence of the behavior of other entities to enhance social responsibility performance. 

Determining relevance and significance of an organization’s core subjects and issues 

An organization must:

• Generate a list of activities
• Identify stakeholders
• Determine possible subjects and issues when activities are carried out
• Evaluate decision’s impacts on sustainable development 
• Recognize all issues of social responsibility

It is important for an organization to consider stakeholders’ opinions on the identification processes to broaden perspective. 

An organization may operate in an area with laws that address subjects of social responsibility. 

However, compliance with the laws is not enough to ensure that all relevant issues of such subjects are addressed. 

After the organization has identified the issues relevant to its activities and decisions, it must generate a criterion that decides which issues have the greatest significance. 

A criteria may include possible extent of impact, potential effects, and identification of societal expectations. 

The Sphere of Influence 

Influence may depend on different external factors such as physical closeness, scope, length, and strength of the relationship. 

An organization derives influence from:

• Ownership and governance
• Economic relationship
• Legal/political authority
• Public opinion

An organization can exercise its influence either to increase positive impacts or to decrease negative impacts, or both. 

If an organization wishes to exercise its influence, due diligence must be observed. 

There are certain ways an organization can practice its influence, such as broadcasting public statements, making investment decisions, engaging with the community, promoting good practices, and many more. 

When exerting influence, an organization must aim at improving and encouraging social responsibility, awareness and behavior. 

Establishing priorities for addressing issues

Priorities vary over time and must be determined both by the organization and its stakeholders to integrate social responsibility in its day-to-day activities and practices. 

The following must be considered in determining whether the action to address an issue is a priority or not: 

• Current performance of the organization
• Affectability of the issue to the organization
• Potential effects
• Time to attain expected outcomes
• Significant cost implications
• Ease and speed of implementation

Raising awareness for social responsibility

To inject social responsibility into all aspects of the organization, it involves commitment and understanding of all levels of the organization. 

The focus of awareness must be on increasing comprehension of aspects, principles, internal subjects, and matters of social responsibility. 

Commitment and understanding must start at the top management to provide motivation to its employees and provide good leadership. 

An organization must identify the need for changes in its decision-making processes and governance to promote more freedom, authority, and motivation. 

It may improve its monitoring and measuring tools for its performance. 

Setting the direction

Social responsibility must be reflected on the organization’s purpose, vision, values, ethics, and strategy to permit it as an important part of an organization’s functions.

An organization can set its direction by allowing social responsibility an integral part of the organization’s internal ways, processes, and structure. 

Injecting social responsibility into an organization

A perfect way of injecting social responsibility into an organization is through its governance that is reflected in its structure and culture. 

An organization must manage its own impacts in each core subject and monitor these impacts within its own sphere of influence. 

When deciding, an organization must take into account the best ways to minimize harmful impacts and maximize opportunities and positive impacts. 

Integrating social responsibility to an organization does not happen one or at the same pace. It is best advised to develop a plan to address social responsibility issues in both short and long terms. 

Role of Communication

It is natural to involve any form of external and internal communication in any practices involving social responsibility such as raising awareness, engaging and creating dialogues with stakeholders, and enhancing the organization’s reputation through social responsible actions. 

Information relating to social responsibility must be complete, comprehensible, responsive, exact, balanced, prompt, and accessible. 

There are various ways of communication such as

• Meetings with the stakeholders
• Communication between the organization’s management and its employees, and suppliers
• Team activities
• Product-related communication such as product labelling 
• Broadcasts or public statements
• Submissions to government authorities
• Periodic public reporting 

There are a lot of methods and mediums that can be used for communication such as meetings, public events, forums, reports, newsletters, magazines, and many more. 

It is important for the organization to have an engaging conversation with its stakeholders to assess the necessary changes, set priorities, and determine the best practices.

Enhancing Social Responsibility Integrity

There are various ways for an organization to increase its integrity. One is through stakeholder engagement, which raises trust and confidence in both parties.

Other methods are through participating in specific certification schemes, constructing an advisory or review committee comprising credible persons, associating with peer organizations, and making relevant community commitments. 

It is also important for an organization to enhance credibility of its reports and claims about social responsibility. 

This can be done through generating performance reports, utilizing a responsible verification process, publishing a statement, reporting conformity of guidelines, and allowing the help of independent individuals in report preparation. 

In social responsibility related activities, an organization may encounter problems or conflicts with its stakeholders. 

To avoid a major fallout between the two parties, the organization must generate mechanisms for resolving such problems. 

Part of these mechanisms is making detailed information on conflict-resolving procedures that are equitable and transparent. 

Reviewing and Improving Social Responsibility Related Activities

Effective performance on social responsibility related activities depends on the organization’s commitment, efforts, careful oversight, objectives, and resources. 

Evaluation and observation of these activities aim to assure that activities are proceeding as planned and they identify any form of crisis. 

It is important for an organization to monitor all its social responsibility-related activities.

There are various ways of monitoring performance on social responsibility such as taking reviews in intervals, benchmarking, and receiving feedback from the stakeholders. 

The most common way of monitoring performance is thorough measurement against indicators. 

An indicator can be a comparable qualitative or quantitative information regarding the results of an activity that changes over time. 

An organization must perform reviews at appropriate intervals. 

These reviews involve comparison of performance across the social responsibility core subjects. 

Based on the outcomes of these reviews, the organization must identify the changes to its activities that would bring out an overall improved performance on social responsibility. 

Some organizations are subject to provide performance data to legal and nonlegal forms of authorities. 

They can increase their confidence in their performance data by obtaining detailed reviews of their internal and external systems.

The purpose of these reviews is to increase the credibility of the data and to confirm the reliability of the organization’s systems. 

An organization must consider different ways to improve its social responsibility performance. 

The results of any reviews can assist the organization in its continuous improvement. 

It is important to emphasize that action on social responsibility is a serious commitment.

Voluntary Initiatives for Social Responsibility

Some organizations have established voluntary initiatives to assist other organizations with social responsibility. 

Initiatives such as addressing aspects of core subjects, and generating ways to integrate social responsibility in the organization come in different forms like codes of conduct, recommendations, guidelines, declaration of principles, and value statements. 

One way to evaluate an initiative is if it reinterprets an established and recognized social behavior. With this, social responsibility must not be treated as a kind of risk management system .

An organization may allow the participation of its stakeholders in creating initiatives and in deciding what tools the organization should use. 

However, it is not necessary for organizations to have initiatives or use the tools for it to be a social responsible entity. 

If an organization takes part in initiatives, the following must be considered:

• Consistency with the organization’s principles
• Ability to provide valuable and practical guidance
• Design of the initiative in correspondence to the organization’s areas of interest
• Applicability of the initiative
• Ability to reach several stakeholders groups
• Reputation of the organization
• Nature of the initiative 
• Accessibility of the initiative
• Kind of the groups governing the initiative

The organization must be cautious with the way it interprets the results of the initiative and must review the initiative from time to time.