Corporate Social Responsibility | On the Mark: Financial Literacy with Mark Zinman

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

Often times financial literacy is equated with building wealth. Here at On the Mark, we encourage not only an inward focus, but also an outward one. One way business owners can support an outward focus is through Corporate Social Responsibility. Here's why.

No business operates in a vacuum; instead, we are accountable to the larger society of which we are a part and to future generations. While we work to achieve our own goals, both personal and professional, it's important that we do not compromise future generations and their ability to meet their goals.

At On the Mark, we take a triple bottom line (3BL) approach: People, Planet, and Profit. Said another way, we align our social, environmental, and governance matters with our strategic and financial goals.

Below, you'll find a brief overview of eight (8) guiding principles that can help you navigate Corporate Social Responsibility.

Organizational Governance & Fair Operating Practices

A CSR Committee can be a valuable resource in maintaining and governing your CSR policy, ensuring consistent adherence to your social responsibilities and commitments and to proactively seek improvement opportunities as the Company scales and grows.

It's also important that all corporate strategy, business decision making, and organizational policies & procedures, whether formal or informal, are performed through a lens of accountability and ethical business practices. Businesses should always compete fairly, respect the intellectual property rights of others, and be sure to avoid corporate corruption at any level within the organization.

Stakeholders + Communication & Reporting

A business' stakeholders include: your suppliers, workforce, customers, shareholders, community, and our environment.

Stakeholder participation, collaboration, and engagement helps to encourage others in our society to adopt a CSR Policy of their own.

Accordingly, you should provide stakeholders with specifics about your approach to CSR, progress made, and future goals.

All communication with stakeholders should be specific, accurate, and complete. Crucially, these communications should also be authentic, without any “greenwashing” of efforts made.

Supply Chain

Supplier diversity is another important aspect of CSR. This includes minority-owned businesses, women-owned businesses, historically underutilized business zones (HUBZone), and other categories.

Further, your supply chain partners should be expected to protect people from abuse, child labor, discrimination, exploitation, and unsafe working conditions. Suppliers should also set appropriate working hours for all employees and contractors, pay a fair wage, and provide safe working conditions. By entering into these partnerships, you can support your suppliers' efforts to not only continually reduce their social risk but also their environmental impact.

Workforce & Fair Labor Practices

Taking care of your workforce is crucial. This includes providing equal employment opportunities free of discriminatory practices, paying fair wages that are not influenced by the sex or gender of the employee, and providing space for employees to air and resolve grievances without fear of retaliation. While the health and safety of employees is the first priority of every business, we appreciate that the majority of employee waking hours are spent at the workplace, and so it must be enriching and pleasant. Career Development Action Plans (CDAPs) can also be useful tools, customized to your employees' unique skill sets, aptitude, interests, and goals.

Customers

Customers are the life-blood of any business; as such, you should be committed to providing a best-in-class customer experience. This involves not only educating all customers about the value of your products and services, and meeting their needs to the best of your ability, but also upholding their data and privacy security, protection, storage, and destruction. As such, you should encrypt any confidential customer information (such as payment information, PII, or PHI) and require Multi Factor Authentication (MFA) to access confidential information.

As your business grows, be sure to regularly seek customer engagement and feedback to guarantee your customer experience maintains a high standard of quality.

Shareholders

When you commit your business to CSR, you're also committed to income and wealth creation in an ethical and enduring way, and to achieving sustainability without sacrificing revenue growth, profitability, or shareholder value.

Participating in Corporate Social Responsibility has been proven to increase a business' quality of innovation and competitive differentiation, customer loyalty and retention, and employee engagement and productivity. As such, CSR increases the financial value of your company and shareholder value.

Community & Human Rights

Investing in CSR practices means that you have a responsibility to invest in your community and help your community thrive.

This could include:

monetary donations to alleviate the burden of those in need in your local community;
taking action to remediate harm done to our environment;
encouraging your workforce to participate in volunteerism, lending their skills to the betterment of the greater community;
providing one paid day per day per year for each employee to participate in charitable and community work;
providing educational presentations offered to community members completely free of charge;
offering training and internship opportunities to the youth in our community in an effort to support the next generation of business leaders.

Environment

An integral part of CSR is a commitment to protecting our environment, supporting biodiversity, and acknowledging the adverse impact of climate change. We recognize that by doing nothing to actively protect our natural environment from further damage to nature or people, we would be doing harm. Accordingly, businesses should commit to doing their part to not only prevent further damage, but to reduce their environmental impact and work toward reversing damage that has already been inflicted.

This may come in the form of certain policies, such as:

for a project to be approved, there must not be excess waste created by the proposed process;
if a resource cannot be reused without being re-processed, it is recycled;
avoiding the use of resources if it’s bad for nature or people (i.e., maintaining a paperless office);
preventing waste from unused resources (i.e., minimizing energy consumption);
reusing resources more than once for the same or different purposes and repairing out of service assets instead of replacing them.