22 Responsibility Issues
Responsible 100 currently explores 22 separate issues across eight broad categories. Click the links below to discover more about the issues and to find the carefully crafted questions designed to help your business determine its exposure to the issue, to assess and consider its current practices, and if and how these may change in the future.
Community
Local Communities
Businesses can help the economy around them through how they choose to spend their money. They can prioritise buying local products or investing in businesses around them that focus on community issues.
Causes & Campaigns
Beyond their focus on profit, businesses are increasingly using their influence to campaign on social issues and causes, which entails taking a credible stand on matters that impact society today.
Environment
The habitability of our planet is denuded by our ever expanding human footprint. All businesses should be able to explain how they are decreasing their negative impacts and increasing their positive impacts on nature’s diversity.
Carbon Footprint
There are ever growing expectations that businesses will take urgent and significant actions to reduce the total amount of greenhouse gases generated by their actions, and thus contribute to the transition to a global net zero economy.
Reducing Waste
Squandering resources is evidently unsustainable and morally unacceptable. Further, waste poses significant harmful impacts to both the environment and people. Waste can and should be designed out of all business processes.
Ethical Choices
Charitable Giving
For businesses, charitable giving is a strategic commitment to give resources, be it monetary, in-kind donations, or volunteer efforts, to support philanthropic organisations. This practice intertwines corporate values with social responsibility to create a profound impact.
Reducing Inequality
There is a wide range of common practices through which businesses can exacerbate or reduce inequality, which ranges from evaluating executive pay and publishing pay ratios to paying the living wage and setting terms of payment for suppliers.
Lobbying & Influence
Government access is an important exercise of democratic freedom, and this usually includes corporate lobbying, as well as access for citizens. Lobbying should be consistent with your organisation’s values, as well as what your organisation stands for.
Finance & Governance
Organisational Culture
Culture is what it feels like to be somewhere – it isn’t always a tangible thing you can put your finger on. Because of this, organisational culture is curious, complex and ambiguous. It is also the key attribute of any organisation and the most critical determinant of morale, cohesiveness and success.
Executive Pay
High executive pay can motivate staff to work hard to gain promotions. However, research suggests that companies in which the highest paid earn over 24 times more than the lowest paid are likely to experience increased staff turnover, absenteeism and industrial action.
Effective Governance
Organisational governance concerns the creation of checks, balances and controls on which proper, honest and effective management depends. It adds value when it is lean, transparent and ethical, focused on tackling operational challenges in ways that complement the big picture vision.
Human Rights
Modern Slavery
Are there slaves in your supply chain? Modern slavery is a multibillion dollar shadow industry enslaving people through supply chains in developed and developing nations alike. It encompasses child slavery, bonded labour, forced and compulsory labour, descent-based slavery, early and forced marriage, and human trafficking.
Rights of Indigenous Peoples
Businesses often cite the need to meet market demands for raw materials as justification for infringing the rights of Indigenous Peoples and seizing their lands. Thus the rights of indigenous peoples are pressing concerns somewhere down the supply chain of almost all businesses and organisations.
Trading with Oppressive Regimes
Organisations have a responsibility in choosing to oppose oppressive regimes, many of which aim to secure silence through oppression. Growing demands of accountability should inspire businesses to be socially responsible by resisting trade with oppressive states and their business enterprises.
Marketplace Ethics
Customer Complaints & Redress
Your business will inevitably receive complaints and customer feedback at some point, regardless of what you are selling. Handling these grievances in a timely and effective manner can have a significant business impact, with speedy resolution and redress increasing customer loyalty and peace of mind.
Product & Service Information
It is a basic responsibility of any business to provide essential information about its products and services that is easily accessible, complete, and stated in plain and understandable language. This transparency not only helps customers make informed decisions but also builds trust and credibility.
Responsible Advertising
Advertising is an important means for businesses to acquire customers. However, as the digital age makes responsible advertising more challenging — with companies able to more effectively collect data and target their audiences’ emotions — the need for ethical practices in the advertising industry rises.
Technology
Cyber Security
Are you prepared for a cyber attack? Businesses possess many types of sensitive information such as financial data, employee records, personal contact details, intellectual property, and financial and medical information. Without adequate cyber security measures in place, these are all put at risk.
Responsible Technology
Every new technology has the potential for unintended consequences that impact our communities and institutions. Companies can consider their role by determining the greater implications of their technology and gain confidence from consumers that they’ve done so.
Workforce
Employee Mental Health & Wellbeing
The proportion of workers who can expect to experience some form of a mental health problem during their working lives continues to increase. Ensuring the good mental health and wellbeing of employees is not only the right thing to do, but also improves business morale and efficiency.
Workplace Diversity
A healthy organisational culture requires inclusivity and celebrates diversity, making everyone welcome, regardless of any characteristics they might hold or aspects of their identity. Evidence strongly suggests that an inclusive workplace is a happier and more productive one.
Living Wage
Responsible employers pay at least a ‘living wage’: the minimum amount an individual can earn to reach an acceptable standard of living. In contrast, the statutory ‘minimum wage’ is the lowest amount an employee may be paid by law, and is considered by most campaigners to be wholly inadequate.
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