Benchmarking performance on a wide range of responsibility and sustainability issues, and using the results to inform and empower businesses, is at the heart of what Responsible 100 does.
We support all kinds of organisations in describing how they respond to the various responsibility challenges they face.
Issue by issue, we explain the basics of what every business should know and respond to at a minimum, irrespective of its size or sector.
The illustrations on this page use Living Wage as an example. On the Living Wage issues page we've set out some of the key information, e.g. we reveal that evidence shows very low or ‘poverty wages’ cause incredible harm and hardship, for families and society generally, and how the Real Living Wage has been designed to ensure the lowest paid earn enough to live on.
In our bespoke question sets for managers and employees in the respondent business, we provide prompts to help these key stakeholder groups to make relevant, basic disclosures regarding their perceived exposure to the issue and to indicate what practices they currently pursue, if any, in summary. These are the earliest steps in our process where nothing is shared nor published.
Over the year, Responsible 100 has explored thousands of different real-life policy and practice examples. And we’ve sought to understand and describe different standards of business response as either:
>> EXCELLENT
>> GOOD
>> OKAY
>> POOR
In so doing, we've built up an incredibly valuable, constantly evolving, open-sourced set of performance benchmarks.
By benchmarking in this way, across their selected priority responsibility issues, we help businesses to discover the pathways open to them to achieve better social and environmental practices and outcomes.
Each benchmark identifies and defines different levels of performance as either POOR, OKAY, GOOD or EXCELLENT. A general statement describes those four performance levels in summary. Under each statement, examples of the sorts of policies and practices businesses are observed pursuing are listed, usually broken down into categories, e.g. Policies & Procedures; Target Setting, Measurement & Reporting; Leadership, Advocacy & Culture. Some such lists include 50 or more examples. The complete benchmarks are shared with those organisations which, through offering answers to our question sets, help to shape and improve the benchmarks on an ongoing basis.
Irrespective of the issue, and bearing in mind just how varied the 20 we currently explore are - e.g. causes and campaigns, waste, inequality, executive pay, rights of indigenous peoples, customer complaints and cyber security are all utterly different - there are common themes between the four performance standard we apply. The below gives a flavor of these common threads we observe, with POOR invariably being the most varied standard.