By Dr Nik Kotecha OBE DL, Founder and Chairman of Morningside Pharmaceuticals
Throughout my working life I’ve always been passionate about businesses giving-back to the communities they work in and serve through their corporate social responsibility endeavours.
In particular, I’m a firm believer that businesses and charities can benefit from each other, and I am an advocate of investing in CSR and ensuring my companies are good corporate citizens.
Businesses can help charities improve the skills of their people, and provide essential entrepreneurial and business knowledge to help them build their own sustainable income generating models.
Whereas charities offer businesses wider benefits associated with enhancing brand and engaging their people.
The Business-Charity Perspective
My company, Morningside Pharmaceuticals, has been investing in CSR for many years.
We have also, for more than three decades, been supplying a wide range of quality UK medicines via international Aid Organisations to the developing world. So I have seen first-hand the importance of Private and Third Sector collaborations to ensuring that people living in lower-middle income countries receive quality highly-regulated medicines.
For us, CSR is about the culture, 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 organisation and feed into KPIs, which will involve colleagues throughout the organisation.
Supporting charities also chimes with people’s personal values, which act as a motivating factor for a company’s employees, while making a positive contribution to society and the wider-world.
Another key area where charities add real value is recruitment of talent. People become aware of a business’ charitable activities and see those businesses as great places to work. This is particularly important in the East Midlands where there is a well publicised skills shortage, particularly in high level manufacturing.
Working with charities also involves people in a ‘common cause’ which is great for team building and bringing your people together under a shared mission.
So it’s clear supporting our communities makes very good business sense.
