While you continue to find your feet in the new normal of increased social responsibility, the last thing you want is for social value to distract from other aspects of your business. You want to be socially impactful, but you don’t want to lose any profitability or productivity in the process.
Prioritising your organisation’s social value isn’t without its challenges. It can be a fiddly process that demands a lot of time and attention from your staff. Time they might not necessarily have to spare.
So today, we want to highlight three subtle ways social value could be stealing productivity away from your business. If any of these resonate, it might be time to rethink your approach and explore new ways to streamline your process.
Lower morale
Social value is nothing without data. To prove you’re having a real difference, you need a large amount of insight to support your initiatives and chosen targets. Seeing your organisation creep closer towards its long-term goals is great fun. But wrangling all of that data to build the full picture? Less so.
A lot of social value admin is repetitive, seemingly low-impact tasks. It’s manually inputting data sets, organising spreadsheets, and applying conversions. And, over time, these jobs can become a massive drain on staff morale and motivation.
A member of your team might be used to getting out of the office every day to speak with beneficiaries. Or being on the frontline, changing communities for the better. If this is the case, spending upwards of five hours a week behind a computer inputting data could be a shock to the system. Especially if it isn’t a usual part of their role, but rather something that’s been added to their plates as social value has risen up the priority list.
If your staff aren’t feeling challenged or like they’re making use of their full skill set, they could end up putting less of a priority on the work. They might end up losing speed, motivation, and your organisation’s social value and wider productivity could suffer.
Wasted time
One of the biggest ways social value could be stealing productivity from your business is in terms of wasted time. Particularly in the case of a large, multi-site organisation, you might have employees, projects, and departments split across multiple sites. And, somehow, you’ve got to make sure one person or team can gather data on behalf of everyone.
How much time does your staff waste chasing colleagues for data? How long do they spend organising an ever-growing number of spreadsheets? Or waiting to hear back from suppliers with their latest insights? Every minute adds up and is taken away from other core operational tasks.
This isn’t even considering the actual time they need to organise and convert the data into a usable format. Plus, if colleagues take too long to share data, it could become outdated, and thus be unusable. Which means the whole process has to start all over again.
Think of the places employee time would be better spent: creating new initiatives, speaking with the local community, or making important decisions. Not waiting for Karen in HR to get back to them with the latest diversity statistics.
Inconsistent results
If your organisation still opts for manual processes, high error rates could be leading to inconsistent results and slower progress. 90% of spreadsheets have errors. And, even with close monitoring, they’re likely to have errors in at least 1% of their cells. Not ideal when you rely on social value data to make a lot of your decisions.
You can’t make the best decisions for your business, people, planet, or community with unreliable data. You need a full, accurate picture of how initiatives are performing and what changes are actually taking place.
And the more time you spend trying to resolve errors or barking up the wrong tree with unreliable data, the less time you have for serious progress and growth.
Your organisation’s social impact is a big priority. And quite rightly so. The way you give back to people, the planet, and the economy is critical. But prioritising your social responsibility shouldn’t leave you sacrificing other areas of your business.
Impact streamlines your social value process. An intuitive, framework-independent platform, we combine powerful automation and smart tools to save your staff time without compromising on progress. To find out more, schedule a demo, or get in touch with the team on 0161 532 4752.