Want To Know What An Organisation Values? Check Their Budget.

‘Can you help our staff feel better?’ – An organisation that recently told some 120-odd staff that they would be made redundant at some point in the future, without any further detail about their offshoring project.

‘We believe that trust is an issue for businesses’ – An organisation that has systematically and regularly cuts internal funding, makes redundancies and shrinks investment in the development of it’s staff, in the pursuit of short-term commercial gains.

‘We don’t have the budget for it’ – an organisation that recently spent several hundred thousand dollars responding to an online viral fundraiser.

‘Our workplace has these values on the wall, days with ribbons, morning teas, and still treats us terribly in our day to day operations.’ – While this could be a wide range of organisations, this is from a large, multinational consulting firm.

Every day we see the hypocrisy and huge impact-literacy gaps between what individuals and organisations would like to do, what they think they’re doing and how they do it.

Spending money on performative ‘donations’ while constantly looking for the cheapest way to look after your staff is a sure-fire way to prove that you don’t value doing the right thing as much as good press. If your ‘impact’ spend is a transactional add-on to external comms/marketing/PR, then it is always going to be focused primarily on visibility and not on great impact.

You can’t simply tell everyone to look out for each other if you, as a business or an individual, are not doing it yourself and leading by example.

I was once told to look at a CEO’s diary to see what really matters to them. It’s the same with budgets, resource allocation and effort across an organisation. So here are some hard truths;

• Pizza days don’t make up for workplace cultures that demand you sacrifice every shred of your personal life to show up for 70 hours a week in the office.
• Posters in the tearoom aren’t a substitute for running a business in a way that looks after the mental health of your staff.
• Charitable donations don’t make up for treating your staff, clients, customers and the environment terribly.
• Short-tern Internships aren’t a substitute for investing in the development of diverse communities in the long term.
• $50 Gift Cards at Christmas don’t make up for underpaying staff, unpaid overtime and denying leave.
• Awareness is the lowest form of ‘impact’, donating to awareness charities is never your best option.
• 50/50 panels do not make up for a lack of support for diverse employees in their day to day operations.
• Deciding to consolidate donations to only one organisation to ‘have greater impact’, is redundant if that organisation is not very impactful. Of course that means recognising measuring and ranking impact as a highly sophisticated skill, and not something you can just ‘google’ to work out.
• Supporting ‘causes’ is not the same as supporting ‘outcomes’. (I think this was fairly well demonstrated through the bushfire fundraising efforts).
• If your social impact efforts don’t have a through-line from the CEO out to the community, that is to say, if your impacts have nothing to do with your core business functions, don’t relate to your HR or people management, have no connection to the work you do, clients you have or communities you work in, aren’t accessible to your staff and are focused on the short-term. Then you can do better.
• Saying you care about innovation and treating CSR and impact attempts in the same way as has been ineffectively done for 50 years is undermining your innovative culture every, single, day.
• Focusing on ‘attempts’ for your social impact, while focusing on ‘outcomes’ for your business performance is a double standard that undermines the quality of help, and the expectation of results for communities and individuals that need the most assistance.

We can do better. It’s not to say that many of these organisations don’t mean well. Regardless of their intention however, they are doing a terrible job of impact. Not making the most of the low hanging fruit, or the high hanging fruit. Doing an inconsistent job of what they say they’re about, and what their actions indicate. Worst of all, these kinds of attitudes leave the people who need the most help hanging. Advocating for the best quality of help, the best business outcomes, the most long-term, integrated and dynamic solutions is what we do every day.

We realise it isn’t a sexy as simply saying ‘if you put this poster up, all will be well in your workplace’, but it is the truth. It’s time we told a bit more truth, did a bit better, and made the changes necessary to ensure impactful business and better supported communities for the long term. The time for purely transactional attempts at impact is over, the time for transformational impacts is now. We are here to assist with the transformation, every day.

The Just Be Nice Project

If you'd like to make 2020 the year where your impact is amplified and those who need help for any reason get it, don't hesitate to get in touch. Or support the Just Be Nice Project for the long-term here. In the meantime, consider also looking for ways to build support around your employees, family, friends, neighbours and those you interact with every day.