THE BIG INTERVIEW
LINDSEY WILLIAMS FUTURES HOUSING GROUP CHIEF EXECUTIVE
We used to carry out a lot of random CSR activities that made people feel warm and cosy, but actually when we looked at what they achieved, either they weren’t really needed or we couldn’t measure the impact. So what we’ve chosen to do instead is
identify the real needs within a community and then decide how best to support them by picking just two or three key areas for us to work in. We find this helps to keep people’s passion
burning and it’s easier to measure the true value, but we’ve also learned lessons that can be applied to other organisations.
‘It’s about understanding what the needs are rather than what makes us feel good about ourselves as a business’
If you’re going to do something, try to address the root cause rather than just treat the symptoms. We did a lot of employability work but realised that until the root causes within chaotic families were dealt with, people wouldn’t be ready to look at their CVs or do work placements. There’s a lot of activities that don’t really
add value – for example, painting a school fence might be a nice thing to do, but what it really requires is money for a particular project. So it’s about understanding what the needs
are rather than what makes us feel good about ourselves as a business. The reason many organisations may not
have CSR strategies like this is simply because they don’t know how to do it or who to connect to. Rather than always doing it themselves,
there’s a lot to be said for supporting other organisations that are experts in tackling a particular issue. Also, we’ve sometimes found ourselves
doing the same job as others because there hasn’t been much co-ordination of activities, so spend some time researching who else is working in a space you want to target.
PHILIP WEBB INVESTORS IN COMMUNITY FOUNDER AND MANAGING DIRECTOR
We operate in the middle of this sector by facilitating the interaction between business and good causes. This is what I call them because while there’s 167,000
charities, there’s about half a million community groups, not-for-profits and schools that fall into the good cause category. We have more than 300 live projects. From my experience, if you want a business to adopt
new principles, you must have a reason for doing it, and there’s a couple of key drivers in the marketplace right now. First of all, there’s natural commercial pressures. The millennials and Generation Z aren’t asking – they’re demanding – to know what businesses are doing in this respect. They’re saying ‘we’ll choose where we put our labour, our productivity and, indeed, who we're going
24 business network April 2021
to support in the market by choosing where we buy our products’, and they're voting with their feet. Also, new measures came into effect in January that
place a 10% weighting on social value in the quality of responses when bidding for central Government tenders. Secondly, we all file our accounts every year to generally accepted accounting principles, known as GAAP. Further down the line are generally accepted impact principles that will be filed alongside your company accounts each year – something that's being pushed by the US and will be here very quickly. While this will initially apply to bigger companies,
we’ve seen with GDPR how the larger companies that are affected have initiated supply chain audits. Eventually, it gets to the small companies and they have to be GDPR-compliant. The same thing will happen with social impact reporting, where businesses must prove their social value credentials to become and remain part of the supply chain.
JILLIAN THOMAS FUTURE LIFE WEALTH MANAGEMENT MANAGING DIRECTOR
Over the past year, much of the elderly population has really struggled with isolation. During the first lockdown, I listed
all our vulnerable clients and, over two hours every lunchtime, I’d pick up the phone and talk to them. I found that people needed prescriptions picking up, dogs walking and other pieces of support. But we also found at that point
of time there were people who didn’t realise they actually had early onset dementia, which we’re finding is an issue with a generation of elderly people now due to isolation. Our team of 10 has now adopted
10 vulnerable clients each and they will phone two of them every day of the week to make sure they’re okay. We’ve won new clients off the back of this, although this isn’t why we’re doing it. I’d encourage companies that
work with these types of people to put staff through courses such as dementia awareness because it can help them provide some amazing support to others.
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