Policy Measuring Success Page

Small Business Journey- The Route Map To Business Value










		Business Principles

		Defining your purpose

		Innovation

		Know the Law

		Managing risk

		Measuring success

		Value everything your business has to offer

		Sharing good practice



	Value everything your business has to offer

How to get started in a small way

First, decide what's important to your business. Think about what your business does and what contributes to its success. Ask your employees, think about your customers.
Check out the range of indicators or measures that are used in reporting tools such as the Impacts of Reporting or the SMEKey.
Don't try to work on all measures at once; work out what is most relevant to your business.
Consider the relevance of customer measures such as customer satisfaction, customer service standards or the benefit to customers of your products or services.
Consider employee measures like skills, satisfaction or health.
Select any relevant impact measures like energy use or CO2 emissions.
Set some targets.
Share news of your progress with staff and customers.
Check how this progress is contributing to your overall business success.

Who can help you go further?

Strengthening the performance of your business in the ways outlined here is really just a matter of common sense. But if you are committed to measuring your non-financial assets then it often pays to get help.

National Help

Business in the Community (BITC) runs the CommunityMark guidelines and award for a company’s investment in its local community. See www.bitc.org.uk

BITC has also developed indicators to encourage companies to assess what measurements are most important and then to report them. The report “Indicators that count: social and environmental indicators – a model for reporting impact” can be downloaded free from www.iosreporting.org.

AA1000 framework provides a process for assessing relationships with different stakeholders in order to improve accountability and performance. Visitwww.accountability.org.uk

Local Help

Check with your local Business Link about how you can get involved with programmes. Details at www.businesslink.gov.uk (England) www.bgateway.com (Scotland) www.businesseye.co.uk (Wales) www.investni.com (Northern Ireland).

Online Help

www.mysmallbiz.co.uk The Small Business Resource Centre contains information on standards and case studies on how small businesses have used standards to improve their performance.

www.globalreporting.org The Global Reporting Initiative is developing globally applicable sustainability reporting guidelines. It gives detailed guidance for voluntary use by organisations looking to report on the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of their activities, products, and services.

Each 'How-To' briefing is available in pdf or word formats. To read the PDF document with a screen reader please link to the Access Adobe website which provides useful tools and resources. Adobe also has a free online conversion tool for PDFs.

PDF file Value everything your business has to offer.pdf
size 161kb

Word file Value everything your business has to offer.doc
size 44kb