We’re always on the lookout to improve our business in all aspects from being as carbon neutral as possible, looking at what we offer to our team as far as wellbeing goes through to what we offer the wider community.
It’s also something a lot of our clients ask us about so we wanted to set some official standards and be accountable for our ethics and the actions. There’s no set limit, but we do want to measure it so we can focus on moving forward. That’s why the Good Business Charter resonated with us.
It’s even more of an honour to be accepted since we’re one of the first firm’s in the country to join!
What is the Good Business Charter?
The official intro…
“Good Business Charter” will encourage responsible capitalism and publicly acknowledge those companies who exhibit such behaviour. Our aim is to inspire as many businesses as possible to change their behaviour, where required, in order to sign up, which should in turn encourage wider good business practice.”
Ten components make up the Charter:
- Real living wage
- Fairer hours and contracts
- Employee wellbeing
- Employee representation
- Diversity and inclusion
- Environmental responsibility
- Pay fair tax
- Commitment to customers
- Ethical outsourcing
- Prompt payment to suppliers
This all had us nodding in agreement and we’ve already made a substantial start!
So where can we improve?
One of the areas that we will be using the Charter to focus is the environmental responsibility. We run a paperless operation: deliberately ensuring the office design had no client record storage facilities and we’ve also drastically reduced the use of single use plastics.
But, we haven’t yet measured our carbon footprint or set specific reduction targets. We want to, we know we need to and the Charter gives us the motivation to properly plan and take action.
What’s the process?
Signing up was easy but the criteria is pretty strict so we had to ensure we were on the journey for most of it: then we’ll use the Good Business Charter framework to plan even more and improve.
If you need some advice about joining, or bringing in some of these aspects to your business feel free to ask! We’d encourage all responsible business owners to at least take a look.
