A blog by our Chief Executive, Dr Nik Kotecha OBE, on setting New Year’s CSR targets and goals for 2020.
As businesses plan for the New Year it’s vital that all areas of the organisation embrace fresh targets, which reflect their ambitions and financial projections for the forthcoming year.
When setting these targets it’s tempting to take the same approach for every aspect of the organisation, but the old adage of ‘one size fits all’ doesn’t always produce the best results.
This is particularly true for implementing a corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy and setting goals and objectives for measuring its return on investment (ROI).
Many organisations choose to invest in CSR because they believe that it’s the right thing to do and want to make society better, rather than anticipating measurable business benefits.
My company, Morningside Pharmaceuticals, has been investing in CSR for many years and we have found that it’s often challenging to measure the impact, particularly when activity is unconnected to the product or service you are marketing.
For us, CSR is about the ethos and identity of our business, which has been built around our mission of ‘making quality healthcare an affordable and accessible reality throughout the world.’ To this end we feel it’s important that our CSR activity lives and breathes our corporate values.
It’s also important that senior management teams lead on CSR activity and view it as part of a package connected to raising brand awareness, engagement of people, motivating employees and recruitment. These activities then feed into raising the whole image of the company and their KPIs will involve stakeholders throughout the organisation.
With this in mind, it’s perhaps best to separate out an organisation’s CSR targets from the overall business targets. By doing this companies can set measurable objectives for their teams, which CSR will inevitably feed into and support.
My advice would be: By focusing on making society and communities better, businesses will benefit. This is because giving back has wider business benefits, rather than just delivering commercial KPIs.
