Social Responsibility covers a very broad range of potential action in our businesses and personally. At ZOË, social responsibility is at the core of our business, we enable people to have impact in one small, but powerful, area – leveraging existing promotional & gift budgets for sustainable change. While we are only 3 years old, we’ve decided it’s high time we put a plan together that articulates measurable targets for some of these other areas. At some point this fall, your company will likely start planning for 2011 so we thought we’d share our top 10 list for reference. If your company does not already have a full social responsibility program, you might choose one of these topics each month to explore. You never know what ideas the team might generate and what might be accomplished in 2011! We’ll be publishing all of our goals in early 2011 on the website so that you can follow along with us on our progress and… maybe even send in your ideas and suggestions.
ORGANIZATIONAL
1. Set Goals: People, Operations, and Community
2. Report Progress – Be Accountable
3. Designate and Empower a Senior Leader for CSR Initiatives
PEOPLE
4. Ensure human resource policies are inclusive and foster a positive work environment – intentionally employ persons with disabilities.
OPERATIONS
5. Employee Incentives – Tie a portion of employee incentives to achieving socially responsible targets
6. Ensure every supplier to your organization – large or small – meets established standards
7. Environmental Impact – actively employ initiatives to reduce paper and other forms of waste produced by your business, use technology for meetings when possible, reduce emissions.
COMMUNITY
8. Promote an active employee volunteer program – set community impact targets
9. Percentage of Profits – Designate a percentage of profits to areas of need
10. Buy One Give One – make a practice of donating your products and/or services to a community in need, for example for every pair of shoes purchased, one is donated.
