Do you like quizzes? The sort you find in magazines in the dentist’s waiting room? Here’s a simple one. There’s only one question: how responsible and sustainable is your company? If you think your company is a force for good in the world, answer A, B or C from the list below.

Answer A if you’re ‘Acting Good’. 

If you’re acting good, you tick a few boxes representing the easy wins. You indulge your staff with a day or two ‘CSR’ time each year where… well, what does ‘CSR’ stand for, anyway? We know it when we see it. Such days are good for team building, the staff have a good time and we all end up in the pub after the session. And some charity benefits from getting money tossed their way or from having their walls painted, a sponsored walk or a cake bake or… you know the scene. What’s not to like?

If the neighbours complain about the vehicles using your site at all hours you will never ignore them. No, you will meet with them – eventually – and explain why things have to be the way they are, so hopefully they will understand better. You like to keep your bills down so this idea of using less electricity is a good one – the office thermostat has been turned down a bit (except in the directors’ suite, of course). And you agree with using sustainable raw materials because sustainable means… ‘always there when you need it’, doesn’t it?

Responsible supply chain? That’s Phil, he’s responsible for our supply chain. Guaranteed to get the cheapest supplies going.

Answer B if you’re ‘Being Good’.

You’ve cut down on your energy usage and found that your company has become more efficient. You’re seriously looking at switching to a ‘green’ energy provider (even though they’re a little bit more expensive) because it’s one way to be seen to help the environment. You’ve reduced your waste quite a bit and you’re proud that your company’s emissions into the air and/or water around you are well within proscribed limits. 

Within the canteen you’ve told kitchen staff to use fair trade products wherever they can, because that’s… only fair, and (despite objections from the procurement department) you’ve insisted that raw materials should be from certified sustainable sources. You read an article recently about the Modern Slavery Act – great to see UK leading the world on this – but you don’t think it applies to your company. 

As for corporate social responsibility, CSR, every year you let the staff decide which charity to support with their fundraising and you encourage everyone to take part. Some do. You’re aware that a few staff are school governors, charity trustees, special constables, union representatives; and you allow them a little bit of company time to carry out those voluntary roles. 

Perhaps not union representatives. 

Answer C if you’re ‘Creating Good’.

A company is as much a part of its local community as any other institution. As a good neighbour, where your company can help out, it does – using employees’ concerns as ‘ears to the ground’. You have a strategic, long term partnership with at least one community organisation, perhaps a hospital, charity, school or old people’s home, and you regularly donate staff time and skills to them, strategically, in a variety of ways. This isn’t ‘CSR’, it’s not a superficial, optional, short term thing; it’s a relationship, a statement of what your company is. Such an expression of mission and purpose helps engage and motivate staff – leading to reduced time off and improved productivity.

You’ve pledged to be carbon neutral by 2030 and made a start; you welcome the improvements to practices (and the bottom line) that this new way of thinking, which includes generating some of your own energy on site, has brought. A policy of zero waste to landfill has been found to work.

Operating through agencies and others you’ve found it relatively easy to ensure that slavery, corruption, human rights abuse and unsustainable environmental practices can be removed from your supply chain, though you need to be constantly vigilant. Within your company there are no artificial barriers to recruitment, promotion or success based on race, gender, lifestyle or background and you pay at least the Living Wage, not just the legal minimum. You regard employees as partners, though not necessarily in the John Lewis meaning of the word. Your company not only feels a better place because of that, but diverse and inclusive ways of thinking certainly contribute to its success.

How did you score?

If you’re most like an ‘A’ company, you Act Good because you perceive that your ‘licence to operate’ requires a minimum level of responsibility. But you’re not sustainable and you’re missing out on many of the choices that will make you successful – over the long term.

If your company is a ‘B’, one that likes to appear to Be Good, then you’ve made some progress. Why not set your sights higher?

‘C’ companies actually Create Good: they don’t count success just in terms of profit, sales or share price and they believe that an organisation built on people has responsibilities to all those on whom they impact. Whilst the impression they make on the market place may still be a potent driver of business, the impact they have on community, atmosphere and planet should either be positive or as fleeting and small as possible.

Of course, you may not have time for this sort of thing; perhaps even ‘A’ is overstating your degree of engagement. If so then, for now, go back to your abuse of labour rights leading to poverty pay, your cynicism towards customers and disrespect for our shared environment. Maximise your profits and shareholder dividends at the expense of all else if you think that’s the way to paradise; but just wait for regulations, public opinion and consumer pressure to catch up with you. 

You’ll soon learn your ABC. 

Tom wrote this review of ‘The Honourable Ladies Volume 1’  (Ed: Jacqui Smith and Iain Dale) for ‘Order Order’, the magazine of the Association of Former MPs, October 2018…

For review purposes I picked up this book of biographies of the 170 women elected to Parliament between 1918 and 1996 with the intention of focusing on perhaps a dozen examples from different backgrounds and histories. Despite its 650 pages I found I couldn’t put it down.

It’s a story of struggle for women both as a gender and as individuals. Some early pioneers had experienced poverty and hardship and only got to Parliament with the help of the trade union movement whilst others clearly carried a sense of aristocratic entitlement: several of these won by-elections caused when their MP husbands were ‘elevated’ to the Lords. 

Missing in those early years were the middle class women from the professional classes that dominate politics today, reflecting Britain at the time. Not missing was passion: no woman was elected by accident, every one had a cause to fight although the tenure of some was but brief. I was intrigued to learn that a woman MP had raised the issue of female genital mutilation as far back as the 1930s.

The book is littered with ‘firsts’: we can all distinguish between the first woman elected MP and the first to take her seat, that bane of pub quizzes, and know that Betty the Tiller Girl became the first woman Speaker; but who were the first woman minister, cabinet minister or Privy Councillor? Another trick question: they were all Margaret Bondfield, a divisive figure in the Labour and trade union ranks, a friend and contemporary of one of my own political heroes, Frances Perkins, the first woman in the American cabinet (1933). Only 44 women have ever emulated Margaret to sit around that Cabinet table.

Virginia Bottomley’s review of Margaret Thatcher, inevitably a longer piece, is no hagiography. I read it on the same day as attending a talk about her by Caroline Slocock, the Labour-voting former civil servant and the only other woman in the room when Margaret Thatcher resigned at Cabinet. Different takes, but clearly describing the same person, the outsider who made it to the top. Outsider? Yes: a Methodist, a scientist, a woman… perhaps also a misogynist, who appointed just one female Cabinet minister, briefly, in all her years in power.

Even before WWII, when the proportion of women MPs barely exceeded two per cent, there was evidently already a cross-party sisterhood. After the war the Commons’ female population doubled but stuck at around four per cent for 40 years, not helped by women sometimes winning their seats off other women. It reached nine per cent in 1992, the last general election in this collection, before attaining the giddy heights of one third of all MPs in 2017, still 18 per cent short of the number to which a truly democratic system should aspire.

This is a wonderful book: eminently readable, a perfect late night diversion delivered in bite-sized chunks. Jacqui Smith and Iain Dale (the only male on the production team) have done a great job in celebrating very special human beings in a hugely sympathetic way, aided by over 100 female biographers who clearly enjoyed distilling those they greatly admired whilst no doubt becoming frustrated at what they had to leave out.

Reading ‘The Honourable Ladies’ was a pleasure although I’m far from finished, having deliberately left my friends and contemporaries from both sides of the House until last. I look forward to another 300 biographies from the 1997-2017 generation and then more beyond, women whose histories have yet to be made.

At the 2018 Labour Conference, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell announced a new policy on employee share ownership… This article was published on the Progress web site in November 2018, as ‘Labour needs to try again…’.

BBC/Aardman

(Between writing and publication it was announced that Aardman Holdings, the company that produces Wallace & Gromit cartoons, is to transfer to an Employee Ownership Trust, a move rightly welcomed by the Evening Standard’s business correspondent).

John McDonnell is absolutely right to say that employee share ownership is a fair, democratic and desirable path for business to take. He might even add ‘and it’s in the long term interests of business to promote it’. But his way of going about achieving this goal, outlined in Liverpool recently, has been ham-fisted and counter productive, prompting the likes of the CBI to rail against a policy they actually support – in principle.

If, ten years go, you had invested in a portfolio of shares from the 69 listed companies where more than 3 per cent of shares are owned by employees then your return on investment today would be massively higher than if you had invested the same money in the FTSE Index generally. Business – as the CBI acknowledges – understands the value of employee share ownership; it gives bosses greater insight into their operations, better powers of risk management and all the employee engagement benefits that arise from being involved in a shared endeavour. The Employee Ownership (EO) sector already has a turnover of over £30 billion and enjoys greater workforce stability than the mainstream, not to mention special EO-transfer tax breaks. In very few EO businesses (excluding co-ops) do workers own the majority of shares.

But what Labour proposed in Liverpool was not a standard ESOP (employee share ownership plan). It was an ill-disguised tax grab. The figure of ten per cent of all shares in all larger public listed companies to be gifted to employees is arbitrary, the idea that personal gains to employees should be limited to £500 per year is unfair (when other shareholders might earn more), and giving the balance of dividends earned to the state was simply cynical. It felt like another route towards the nationalisation of the 100 biggest monopolies, and we know where that policy ended up.

But John did highlight a dilemma: on one hand we have the John Lewis model, where every employee has a stake in ownership through a trust that owns all the company’s shares on their behalf, and when you leave the company you don’t take your stake with you. On the other, there’s the Post Office, where individual employees own some of the company’s shares for life – or, more likely, until they sell them on the open market, which dilutes the link between employee and company interests over time. The former model, whether owning some shares or all, is the more sustainable.

The principle of employee ownership – especially through co-operatives – has long been a tool in the socialist toolbox. But it’s also in tune with the ‘people’s capitalism’ that Cameron, May and even Thatcher espoused; an excellent report on the subject, the Nuttall Review, was written for the Coalition government. And a Bill that entitles businesses to get loans at favourable rates where the owner transfers ownership to employees has just been passed – in Donald Trump’s America.

I think McDonnell is confusing a number of issues: profit-sharing is not the same thing as EO, though both can benefit the business through higher productivity. If you want more money from business then reverse the cuts to Corporation Tax, easy to do whilst retaining UK’s ‘competitive’ global position in the tax stakes, and reform corporate governance, not least by bringing the 2006 Companies Act up to date in relation to promoting the interest of stakeholders and not just shareholders. And devise an acceptable model of promoting employee representation on company boards.

Let’s build a sovereign wealth fund, and through it, on behalf of all the people, invest in ethical companies to generate a profit which can be used to pay for pensions, health and social care. Pie in the sky? It’s exactly what happens in Norway, recently re-confirmed as the world’s most socially progressive nation.

Employee ownership and employee share ownership should both be encouraged, but not forced through. Let’s make the case for businesses to be more inclusive in their ownership by showing that it’s in their interests, in the long run. 

Not every tide flows in this direction: whilst we all welcome Amazon’s recent decision to pay above the Living Wage to all employees, who noticed that they’re paying for this by scrapping an employee profit-sharing scheme?

Tom Levitt is a former Labour MP and the author of The Company Citizen

‘Insights for a Better Way’ is a collection of almost 50 essays, edited by Caroline Slocock for Civil Exchange/Carnegie Trust and published in July 2018. Here is Tom’s contribution…

Insights for a Better Way is edited by Caroline Slocock

Once upon a time big companies did CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility). It subtly reminded employees that they were team members whilst ticking a few philanthropy boxes and was delivered by – well, that didn’t really matter. Maybe volunteers, perhaps a dedicated department with no other role in the company, rarely the HR people. And adopting a ‘Charity of the Year’ allowed the company’s goodness to be more widely appreciated; charities liked it because it was easier to get money from a new source each year than wring it out of an old one. For them, raising money was, mostly, what it was all about.

Things have changed. 

First, some companies realised that their choice of charity partner was significant: the right choice signposted the purpose and mission of the business far more than did random fluffy animals, well-known diseases or distant children, causes that polls of employees were prone to promote. Second, they realised that a year was not long enough to build a proper relationship or learn from missed opportunities. And third, cash was not necessarily king: time and skills could be at least as much appreciated as money when appropriately deployed.

This meant that new ideas could take root:

• Flexibility, rather than the rigid ‘corporate volunteering day’, was more attractive both to charities and to participating employees.
• As sceptics pointed out, employee volunteers were not really volunteers: they were being paid whilst working alongside those ‘doing it for nothing’. It was the company, not the individuals, that was contributing its time and skills.
• Integrating CSR into the mainstream operation of the company, rather than treating it as an optional extra, could benefit the company.

This new generation of company citizens talked of ‘purpose’, ‘mission’ and ‘partnership’, leading to a less altruistic, possibly more honest approach: there was nothing wrong with the company profiting indirectly from its engagement with good causes. Indeed, this justifies any investment made in the process.

So, we’ve moved from employees taking initiatives to sponsor each other, bake cakes and ride bikes for money, through communal days out for painting or gardening, through providing the skills that charities and community groups need – right through to a company expressing its own mission and purpose through a strategic approach to its relationship with the community. 

‘Health at Work’ is a multifaceted British Heart Foundation (BHF) campaign. Companies that engage with it gain from reduced sickness absence, higher morale, better team building and reduced early retirement on illness grounds. The return on investment for a workplace health strategy can be as much as 34:1 based on reducing absenteeism, accidents and staff turnover and the resulting improvement in productivity. Participating companies also report better employee engagement and internal communications. At Asda’s distribution centre in Leicestershire BHF promotes its Workplace Wellbeing Charter. Here, on-site gym membership costs employees £3 per month and the company supports free fruit days, helps employees buy bicycles, offers smoking cessation clinics and health checks and even stages a ‘coast-to-coast’ static cycle event to raise money for BHF. The Asda scheme initially reduced absenteeism by 1.5 per cent – worth £200,000 to the company, a massive return on a £20,000 investment, in a single year.

Four hundred employers and 10,000 individuals have backed the Time to Change pledge. Led by charities Mind and Rethink Mental Illness it’s a commitment to change attitudes and risks around mental health. The charities help create bespoke workplace plans including events to support mental health Champions. Longstanding supporters include Transport for London, Imperial College, E.ON, Anglian Water and Lloyds Bank. A manager in a big white-collar company noted that the main cause of death in adult males under 40 is suicide. He said: ‘Ours is a stressful business and our median employee is a 29-year old male; we need to manage them carefully.’

In America the Dell Foundation, a major source of philanthropic funding, has identified a significant shift in their charity partners’ needs, away from cash and towards skills and expertise. They describe the shift as from capital to competence, intervention to innovation, coordination to collaboration and short-term fix to long-term involvement. Given a choice between a $100,000 gift and an equivalent value in counselling, skilled volunteering or access to decision-makers only four in ten of Dell’s 700 partner NGOs, worldwide, would today choose cash. Just four years earlier that figure was seven in ten.

Collaboration between charities and businesses has always existed and is ever evolving. No longer is it acceptable for corporates to write cheques to hide their misdemeanours, boost short term sales or please the apocryphal chairman’s wife; one way traffic is, in many cases, over. What’s happening today in the best cross-sector partnerships between the private and voluntary sectors is mutual respect and common advantage, longer term relationships based on shared interests and complementary skills. 

Unlike the ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ era of the Charity of the Year, this is a truly sustainable development.

In April 2018 Tom co-presented a paper at Edinburgh University with Professor Alex Murdock of London South Bank University. The Conference was the IRSPM and the theme was business solutions to problems where the public and voluntary sectors had proved absent or ineffective.

Alex provided the academic context whilst Tom wrote most of the paper and told a workshop of academics and practitioners from around the world about Fair for You, which he had helped found in 2015.

Here’s the paper.

In his book, The Company Citizen, Tom Levitt argues that businesses should work with charities for the good of society – but also in their own interests. This article was written for the website What Charity, ‘the Tripadvisor for charities’, launched in March 2018.

There’s no shame in advocating that business should have a reason for giving to charity that’s more than the moral, slightly guilt-tinted one of ‘giving back’. A business case for a company to work with charities makes it sustainable and repeatable, helping build positive community engagement into the company’s operations.

Superficially, companies find the charitable giving of cash tax-efficient but this is where business giving should start and not end.

There’s much evidence that companies known for their support of charities enjoy greater interest and loyalty from their customers. M&S maintains its successful partnership with Oxfam, notwithstanding recent events, and Boots’ liaison with Macmillan Cancer Care is now six years old. In both cases the relationship is not confined to cash but includes employee volunteering, training, skills exchange and strategic gifts in kind. Gifts in kind can reduce waste, surpluses and processing or disposal costs.

For companies seeking contracts with local authorities all of these activities can count towards the ‘social value’ that the law allows public bodies to seek from their procurement practices. Some businesses support ‘Buy Social’, a campaign in which they deliberately use their procurement powers to favour social enterprise suppliers, businesses which rank social or environmental goals as a greater priority than the maximisation of profit.

Perhaps the biggest prize businesses can win from working with charities is employee engagement.

Allowing employees to donate to good causes, perhaps through payroll giving, gives them a level of involvement and control; allowing them to use company time for fundraising, ditto. This is just a start! Where the company allies its own power to support charity with that of its employees an even  greater sense of purpose amongst staff is generated; it’s this purpose which generates employee loyalty and engagement. ‘Time volunteering’ creates a team spirit and can deliver greater impact than can fragmented individuals.

Where employees have the opportunity to use their professional skills in a good cause, a process which allies company purpose and mission with long term commitment, with the aim of bringing about a sustainable change for the better in the world, engagement is heightened yet again. Some companies allow every employee up to three days a year of paid leave to support such work.

An engaged employee is more committed for the long term, more productive and a better ambassador for their company than is a less engaged one. Bearing in mind that employee engagement in British business generally is at rock bottom whilst UK productivity has not improved in a decade, positive, active, sustained support of charities by businesses can only be a good thing – and not just for charities’ beneficiaries.

Tom published this article on Linked In, in response to a recent CAF report:

The Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) has been performing a valuable service for 90 years by safeguarding philanthropic funds around the world to help charities build resilience, develop infrastructure and create opportunities for positive social change; in short, to act as a force for good. It’s also a valuable observer and commentator on the state of the charity world and civil society generally. Its latest report, ‘Corporate Giving by the FTSE100’, is very welcome. In a friendly and positive way, however, I’d like to suggest a few issues to bear in mind when reading the report.

My concern is that the headline news, that corporate donations to charity are down by 26 per cent in cash terms since 2013, comes with far too many caveats. Since 2013, reporting of corporate donations to charity hasn’t been obligatory so, the report concedes, some FTSE100 members have ceased doing it. The report seems to imply that those not reporting (whilst others continue) have something to hide, but this need not be the case. The report again concedes that the donation of corporate cash to charities, when expressed as a proportion of pre-tax profits, has actually been going up: indeed, the trend line for this figure suggests it has doubled (from 1 to 2 per cent) since 2009.

It could therefore be argued that – relative to what they can afford – businesses are being more generous, not less, than they used to be. And this is over a period when the proportion of pre-tax profits being paid out to shareholders has gone through the roof – one explanation as to why wage growth has stagnated for a decade. Although charities have not fared as well as shareholders from corporate bonhomie over this period, relatively speaking they’ve done a lot better than employees.

CAF correctly argues a business case for companies to engage with charities:

‘Companies are increasingly recognising that they need to better demonstrate their value, both social and economic, to maintain public trust.’

Indeed, more than half of British consumers are attracted to companies known to support a charity. But there’s a danger of the pot calling the kettle black! According to the perennial barometer of trust, Edelman (whose report is cited by CAF), confidence that business can be trusted to ‘do the right thing’ is indeed falling, to 52 per cent at the last count. CAF doesn’t mention that Edelman’s figure for charities – at 53 – is hardly any better. Recent stories featuring Carillion and Oxfam will have done little to boost either of these figures.

Most worrying about the CAF report is that it assumes that engagement with charities is the only measure of a company’s ‘good’. It repeats the idea of support for and duty towards charities several times without mentioning the ultimate beneficiaries of such philanthropic activity. Perhaps, just perhaps, some businesses have found a better way of engaging sustainably with communities and the environment than through charities?

The report is based on a common means of assessing corporate engagement, the well established and respected London Benchmarking Group (LBG) Index, a measure of cash and in-kind donations and the value of work hours donated through employee volunteering plus associated management costs. LBG metrics are applied to FTSE100 reports even where the company has not itself adopted the LBG method. And that’s a problem: conscientious companies are increasingly concerned not about the inputs that they make to society but about their outputs, outcomes and impacts – the changes that their activity brings about. Although the LBG Index can be used to measure outcomes it’s essentially a measure of inputs – a situation reflected in too many corporate reports. Applying an outcome-based analysis – ‘What’s actually changing as a result of our actions?’ – is not only responsible in itself but may prompt the company to then ask ‘Is investment via a charity the best way to achieve this?’

The American Dell Foundation works with 700 charities worldwide. Each year it asks its partners ‘How can we best support you?’ Five years ago an overall majority said ‘cash’; today the biggest single reply was not cash, nor even volunteer hours and skills, but measures to develop leadership and impact. Even more pertinent, when asked where the source of ideas for impact and social change would be in the future 62 per cent said social entrepreneurs, 40 per cent said people living on the front line and only 32 per cent identified local voluntary organisations. Dell isn’t in the FTSE100 but if this change in emphasis, reflected elsewhere also, is happening in Britain then ‘Companies listening to beneficiaries’ may have contributed to CAF’s results.

If a company is looking to work with a government agency or a local authority it may be required to report on the ‘social value’ it generates. The Social Value Act is agnostic on whether such value should be delivered through a charity partner. But businesses that increase their investment in apprenticeships, reduce their carbon footprint, build a comprehensive relationship with schools can all claim to be delivering social value – without using charities as an intermediary. Such beneficial and positive engagement does not feature in CAF’s accounting.

Take Lifebuoy soap: in many parts of the world Unilever has reduced the size of the soap bar (along with the price) to deliberately make it more accessible to people on lower incomes. Alongside this, the company has been campaigning in high risk countries to raise awareness of water-borne diseases such as cholera. In those areas a lot of soap is given away but a lot’s sold, too – and lives are saved as a direct result. Although local charities do support the Unilever campaign they are not an integral part of it, so nowhere in the CAF methodology could this ‘good’ be recorded.

There’s no shame in companies admitting that boosting employee engagement (a route to enhancing productivity) can be a valuable outcome of engaging charities. But getting workers on board with the company mission and purpose isn’t just about words: it’s about workers realising that they and their work can ‘make a difference’, ‘change things’, even ‘deliver social value’. A bike ride or cake bake might create a team spirit and raise money for charity but it only ‘makes a difference’ at one stage removed, when the charity spends it. Employees who volunteer in company time (using company skills) can create more change in a child’s life, and feel a greater sense of involvement in that change, by working with them on reading skills than by any number of miles covered whilst wearing lycra.

So, panic not. The headline fall in corporate sponsorship of charities might actually be a good thing: it might reflect company ownership of their impact, evolution of their social purpose alongside their financial one, reflect a development of the values of the ‘company citizen’. We should not read this CAF report as saying that companies are moving away from facing up to their social and environmental responsibilities.