Following our blog on the triple bottom line, we thought it would be useful to drill into how you can go about enhancing your Microsoft Business Applications solution for societal impact.
The fact is that every organisation will have a different view of the specifics of the changes they need to effect, so we start off by looking at why you might want to do anything in this space at all, before moving onto how you could go about it and some specific examples.
Why apply a societal lens to continuous improvement
“Your corporation’s impact on human beings is at the very root of your legal, operational, and reputational risks, even if how those risks might manifest is unpredictable.”
Alison Taylor, Stern School of Business
Let’s set aside societal good, motivated staff, reduced absenteeism, customer loyalty and all the other benefits that accrue when you work as an organisation on increasing your contribution to your community. We can instead focus on avoidance of risk, which is the sort of tangible metric that most executive teams can get behind.
Some of the major public health shifts of the past 20 or so years have gone hand in hand with the discovery of collusion and cover up in the associated industry (e.g. smoking, asbestos, lead in petrol) and the handing out of fines by government or by the courts to the companies that have put their profits in front of their duty to the society in which they operate. For the tobacco industry, this amounted to $368.5bn in the US alone.
This set of fines covers the impact that the operation of the business of tobacco had on the stakeholders (users of the product, families of the customer, etc) as well as the impact on society as a whole (largely healthcare impact). These are two of the three main societal impacts that we should consider, with the third being the staff working in your organisation.
How to go about it
From this example, it is obvious that the avoidance of potential future risks is going to set your company up well for the future. For a lot of companies, the question then becomes, what should we do and how do we go about it. We use structured process that you can follow to set some goals:
- Understand what is important to you as a whole company
- Incorporate it into your business plan
- Understand the metrics you will use to track success, such as employee engagement or time to achieve customer goals
- Create processes and tools to guide you on the journey
- Continue to check back regularly
Alison Taylor of Stern Business school reiterates in a recent Harvard Business Review article that one of the big mistakes organisations make in this area is for executives to set the goals by themselves rather than involving the whole organisation in a holistic discussion. The other is in not setting tight priorities which the company can actually achieve. Ending world hunger is a worthwhile goal, but not one that an individual organisation can achieve on their own.
Continuous improvement of your tech stack to achieve improved people impact
There are 3 levels of people impact that we need to consider- - staff, stakeholders, society. The first level is an obvious one of what changes can we make to our business systems that have a positive impact on our staff.
Staff impact example
I worked at a client, a staffing company, where they had a team whose job was to take scanned copies of timesheets coming in from contractors around the world and retype them into the record system. All day, every day, retyping timesheets.
We implemented an application whereby the far flung contractors could enter timesheets directly into the system, with error checking happening as standard as part of that process. This released the team from their mundane tasks and allowed them to focus elsewhere.
The high value contractors for this company were paying for a premium service, where all of their travel, insurance and expense needs were anticipated and met. The team refocussed from timesheet retyping to delighting their contractors with great service, are more fulfilling job which returned value to the company and to their customers.
Stakeholder impact example
The stakeholders of a company could be the families of staff, customers, shareholders – anyone with a connection to the organisation.
We worked with a local council who had a pest control department that used physical job sheets to direct their work – these were printed off and issued, sometimes daily and sometimes weekly, to give the best control operatives their list of jobs for the day. If an emergency job came up that required immediate attention, the impacted individual would call the council and ask for help but there was no reliable way of getting the job onto the job sheet to be dealt with.
We created an app for the operatives to use out in the field which managed their next job queue. With this in place, emergency jobs could be pushed to the app with immediate effect, reducing the wait considerably, and enabling the pest control department to provide a targeted service to their council residents in need.
Society impact example
Tony’s Chocolonely is a chocolate manufacturing brand with a broad mission statement to end modern slavery in the chocolate supply chain. In order to do this they are setting an example of how to run a slavery free chocolate supply end to end with a range of measures.
As a part of this, Tony’s are managing their suppliers and dealing only with a select groups of cocoa farmers who can guarantee their working practices. However, if there is an unanticipated surge in demand, Tony’s would have to go outside of this supplier group and deal on the open market which would break their ability to certify chain of custody and therefore their mission.
In order to avoid this, Tony’s have implemented demand management to predict their upcoming surges in demand and protect their customer promise.
Conclusion
It may feel like it would be difficult to relate improvements to your business systems to ways of improving your impact on people across the board, but hopefully these real world examples have shown how everything can contribute to your stated improvement aims. The important thing is to understand what it is that you are trying to achieve, to commit to it as a company, and to start to move towards that goal as soon as you can.
If you’re working towards a people focussed goal, or are wondering where to start on that mission, I’d love to hear from you, so please get in touch!
