Crowd-powered Benchmarks
Businesses – and other types of organisations that participate in Responsible 100 – pool their knowledge, know-how and problem-solving skills when they share their stories about how they respond to the different social, environmental and ethical challenges they face. A fundamental feature of how we work is placing each story on a simple performance scale.
We cover a wide range of issues from modern slavery to cyber security to responsible technology. For each issue, we define and loosely describe Poor, Okay, Good and Excellent standards of performance. We do this with the active involvement of our community, considering the various policies, practices and positions a business can take, and how those impact upon society, nature and our shared future.
Top level definitions of these standards can be universally applies as follows:
Every time a participating business or organisation submits or updates a story, our performance benchmarks and definitions are tested again, and recalibrated as needed.
Priorities X Performance = Improvement Plans
Benchmarks enable us to better understand the issues we explore, and the different ways in which businesses can respond and adapt to them. They also enable us to set goals and measure and track performance.
We’ve benchmarked scores of social, environmental and ethical issues, over many years, working with more than 800 businesses and partner organisations, such as NGOs, campaigners and civil society groups.
With each new story that is submitted, our shared understanding of the issue, and how organisations respond, increases. As does the potential for each benchmark to serve organisations in improving their performance from Poor to Okay, from Okay to Good, and from Good to Excellent, as far and fast as possible.
For each participating organisation, we do a little work on each issue to arrive at an agreed level of priority, and of current performance. It is frequently the Critical issues, on which current performance is Poor that we begin the work of helping participants change their policies and practices to improve. But not always.
In order to finalise an improvement plan for a participating organisation, we assess what resources are required for it to improve on each issue, as well as the risks involved in trying to improve and in not trying to improve. We are thus able to work out which issues presents the greatest opportunity for a business to improve on so that it maximise its net positive impacts.
Owning Poor Performance
Stories vary from the simple to the inspirational. But all are important because they increase our shared knowledge and understanding of any given issue.
Good and Excellent practices often inform and inspire others. But so too does the honest acceptance of Poor practices and of seemingly intractable problems or barriers to improvement.
Even the best businesses are poor at something. It is unrealistic to expect otherwise. Those that can accept and own that within the Responsible 100 initiative are valued members of the community. They provide unique opportunities to source and pool the creativity, innovation and problem-solving skills that exist across and within all platform users.
Together, we stand a far greater chance of overcoming challenges and identifying and removing barriers to improvement. Together, we have a greater appreciation and understanding of Poor practice, and where and how changes can be made to become Okay.
Businesses that pursue Poor practices because that is how they make their money, and they have neither the wit, imagination nor motivation to work out how to deliver their goods and services without impacting negatively upon people or planet, are the only businesses that we are unlikely to be of service to.
How To Contribute To The Benchmarks
Currently we have 24 issues in our roster, 20 of which are explored within our Responsibility Indicator tool.
On each responsibility issue we explore, we aim to gather as many different examples of policy and practice as possible. Where examples of Excellent are hard to come by, we ask our partners to imagine what that could be! We then calibrate and recalibrate as more stories are received and our understanding of the different responses to the challenges and opportunities grows.
We welcome suggestions to tackle and benchmark additional responsibility issues not currently on the list. We also welcome debate on the current selection. We are always open to supporting businesses with specific issues and to seeking new experts and specialisms when gaps are uncovered.