Social Responsibility: Approach
We work with clients on different aspects of social responsibility helping them understand and respond to society's changing expectation of business.
We help clients engage in the debate about the role of business in society by helping them think through social trends and impacts. We help plan and execute engagement with key stakeholders - especially NGOs, governments and community representatives - based on the experience of i2a's team in working in these areas with major corporations. We also can conduct the stakeholder mapping and relationship analysis necessary to put in place effective stakeholder management processes within any business.
At our roundtable event in October 2009, 20 participants from different organisations discussed some of the challenges of reporting on responsibility in the 21 Century. You can read more about the outcomes here.
We help clients comply with laws, regulations and internal standards by translating these into the behaviours of their people across their organisation. Typically this means creating and implementing code of conducts and appropriate management and control mechanisms. We discuss more on our approach to compliance separately.
We help clients respond to the challenge of meeting, or exceeding, social expectations in a number of ways. We have the necessary project management expertise to manage response programmes of different types, but we work mostly in three different ways:
- Firstly, through creating collaborative approaches with third-parties, including selection, initiation, on-going management and exit phases of partnerships for specific projects. We also have experience of working on pan-industry initiatives that deliver beneficial change.
- Secondly, we can also conduct and respond to Environmental and Social Impact Assessments (EISA) applying lessons learned from previous experience of working on major projects.
- Thirdly, we can identify response opportunities, then design and implement business models in different parts of the supply chain.
