Sarah Stone, Founder & Director, Samtaler
Tell us about what you do?
I help organisations find practical ways to create social value that also benefits them and builds economic value. Often that's helping them maximise their activities' positive impact and mitigate the negative.
Many organisations don’t even realise that they are operating in a way that might unintentionally harm their stakeholders. For instance, a business might outsource its recruitment process without thinking about how this could prevent local people from seeing and applying for jobs. That’s where I come in, to identify the issues, spot the opportunities for change and map out the solution.
There’s a school of thought that economic and social value are mutually exclusive. How would you dispute this argument?
Businesses are not charities. We need businesses to thrive and be profitable because they are the lifeblood of our economy. They provide the jobs that pay the wages, that pay the taxes that pay the public sector and keep everything going.
An essential part of my philosophy has always been that creating social value must also contribute to the company's economic value. In the short-term, it might cost more money (although not always), but in the long-term, it will always build value for your business.
“We must remember here that corporations are not just faceless entities. They are all just a collection of human beings making decisions. The media might tell a different story, but generally speaking, ‘malpractice’ in business is rarely intentional or criminal. Most people want to do the right thing.”
So, businesses should see it less as ‘doing the right thing’ and concentrate on the benefits of creating social value?
Exactly. The businesses that do it well see the benefits from the outset; once you start doing it, you won’t look back. You will have better relationships with your staff which makes them more loyal because they enjoy working for a company that ‘does the right thing’; it’s easier to recruit because people are attracted to working for you; more people will want to buy from you; and it strengthens your broader stakeholder relationships, especially if some of your stakeholders are policymakers or the public sector because this is such a huge priority for them at the moment.
A big part of what I do is taking the policymaker's intentions - identifying what the government would like companies to do - and translating that into plain English and finding practical ways that companies can deliver these things. A lot of this isn’t political. It’s just common sense.
Photo By: Ming Jun Tan on Unsplash
If there are so many benefits to be had, why don’t organisations already do these things?
I used to ask myself the same question when I worked in politics for David Cameron as his external relations adviser. I’d see all these companies spending millions lobbying the government to change things – things we knew consumers wanted - and I used to think, if you weren’t trying to lobby the government to make a change and you just made that change, then policymakers would come to you, and you wouldn’t have to spend all this money.
The problem is that the way companies are structured means that if something becomes law, it becomes someone’s job to make sure the company complies with legislation. Those systems and processes aren’t in place if it's not law. But the government doesn’t like to use legislation because it takes a long time to bring onto the books, so it uses other mechanisms to encourage change by publishing policy documents and other papers and reviews, and the organisations that pay attention to these are the ones on the front foot.
For instance, the new Social Value Model includes lots of outcomes and policy recommendations that have never been made legislation and probably never will be legislation for lots of different reasons, but businesses still have a lot to gain from taking these recommendations seriously.
We touched on how social value can drive-up costs, at least in the short term. Is this a barrier for some businesses?
Good social value is just good business. It shouldn’t drive costs up. That’s one of the things I am working hard to combat. I worry that social value could go down the road of health and safety or GDPR because it could be misconstrued as an excuse to do the bare minimum or turned into another laborious hoop for suppliers to jump through. It certainly shouldn’t be used as a reason to ask suppliers for unreasonable or too expensive things.
Good social value is about collaborative working in a way that benefits everyone involved. Once you understand it and see how it will grow your business and how you can do it in a way that doesn’t raise your costs, it suddenly seems the obvious way to do business.
Good social value is about collaborative working in a way that benefits everyone involved. Photo By: "My Life Through A Lens"
Where should organisations start when it comes to creating social value?
You have to ask the right people the right questions to enable you to identify what you might be doing wrong and where the opportunities are for you to do things differently. Often times its just simple improvements that make the biggest difference.
An example is that I’ve recently worked with a wind farm company undertaking a lot of tree felling and replanting. I suggested that there might be other ways to improve the biodiversity of the site, so we spoke to the company’s stakeholders and people in the local community and found out there was a pond that was a really important site for biodiversity and that locals had wanted to flood and expand for years. Blocking the stream and expanding the pond hardly cost the wind farm company anything, but it had a big positive impact on the community and on the environment.
Finally, why did you decide to create the Social Value Files?
I really believe that it’s not down to the government to legislate these changes, but it’s up to all of us to take responsibility and do things differently. It’s not rocket science, but I want to inspire and inform as many people as possible so that they understand why creating social value is essential and are able to do it themselves.
How we can help
At Samtaler, we understand the importance of your social value commitment. You’re here because you care about the impact your business has on society and want to be better. We want you to succeed, and we know from experience that achieving social value requires skill, strategy, and support.
To find out how we can help send an email to hello@samtaler.co.uk
Sign up to The Social Value Files for inspiration and practical ideas to create social value for your business.
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