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Minimize these risks |
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| Employee retention and motivation; a responsible reputation enhances your company's image so you can keep and attract good staff, that saves you on costs of recruitment and keeps your staff turnover down. If you're managing employee issues well you'll get more motivated, productive and loyal staff. |
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Operational inefficiency & poor management; inefficient use of human and material resources leads to reduced productivity and quality as well as costing you to remedy mistakes and taking up valuable management time in sorting out the problems as they come up.
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Access to supply contracts; larger corporates and the public sector are under pressure to show that they're responsible and produce goods and services in an ethical way. They therefore place more and more requirements on their suppliers to act responsibly and talk about their social and environmental performance.
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Poor financial performance; having social and environmental policies is reported to provide a sound indication of good management in a company. 78% of European business leaders "agree that integrating responsible business practices makes a company more competitive" (BITC FastForward research 2002)
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Good neighbours; managing your relations with the local community brings great benefits in terms of reputation, security, customers and employees.
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Troublesome neighbours; community resentment of a company in their midst can cause all kinds of problems from graffiti and vandalism to objections on planning applications and recruitment problems.
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Accessing finance and partnerships; investors and fund managers increasingly look at company management of non-financial risk and investor pressure is on to make companies adopt best practice or sector specific codes. A responsible company will also find like-minded businesses to work with.
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Limited access to finance; Banks and insurers are asking companies to manage non-financial risk, to ensure their operations meet relevant legal regulations and to manage risk around social and environmental liability or risk to reputation.
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Customer loyalty; Customers look more and more at companies' environmental and social performance. Research shows that customers trust companies less and want them to demonstrate their responsibility visibly.
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Poor brand reputation; concerns over social and environmental impacts (child labour, irresponsible adverstising, pollution fines, sex discrimination cases) can damage brand and company reputation with knock-on effects on sales, recruitment and retention, as well as supply contracts and access to finance and loans.
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Regulations; Adequate preparation for regulations coming from the government, councils, the EU, the Environment Agency and being seen to report and act on social and environmental issues ahead of time, gives businesses a head start and also makes some regulations less likely, because you're doing it voluntarily anyway.
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Increased regulation/legislative non-compliance - fines; failure to comply with the law can result in fines, loss of contracts and reduction in investment, it's also a dent in the company's reputation.
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