The Stanley East Company congratulates the winners of the BACS Good Business Eggs of 2015.
“Despite huge challenges with greater numbers of nominees this year, the process and judging of the awards was exciting and nailbiting” said Julie Donvin-Irons, Director of The Stanley East Company.
Speech at the BACS Good Business Egg Awards 2015
How the GBE’s started, how they work and some feedback from the panels.
Within 24-48 hours after the Christchurch earthquake on February 22nd 2011 we surveyed business websites and their social media to see how they communicated to their staff, families and public a clear message of what to do, keep safe and soforth.
I am sure our BACS Community member Red Cross NZ will testify that good communication is paramount after any disaster and the impact of this can be life-saving.
We were astonished to find evidence of really poor communication alongside excellence by others. Generally the financial sector was way ahead of many, some businesses scored zero in our books we saw good corporate social responsibility in NZPost, Deloitte, ANZ, Westpac, ASB, KPMG.
We published this finding with the term ‘good eggs’ of those aforementioned and from thereon we maintained the good eggs and continue to use it to showcase good business practise…like here tonight!
For business: The awards are for business organisations. What constitutes a business? Those that act like a business. We also have checked out govt departments/SOE’s too, they also have a social responsibility. In fact DOC won the Education GBE category last year.
And unusually it’s community that does the deciding and presenting.
Mythology No you don’t need to be a member of BACS to be nominated for a GBE, scrutinised and potentially win!
The Process: My own knowledge in CSR began in 1991 and what most of us know is that by emulating good leadership can benefit those on the CSR journey. So by recognising and sharing good examples we believe this can benefit both business and community and society as a whole.
So to find how you got here! We use surveys, questionnaires, community feedback and names pop up sometimes that we may not have heard of.
This past year we questioned 54 recent graduates on who they had wanted to work for: “Do you think it’s important that businesses in New Zealand have a corporate social responsibility?” 98% said YES. Did you take into consideration whether the business you were investigating had a sustainability/community engagement strategy?” 80% said YES What do you think is the value of a business investing in the community and why?
One commenter said it was about “Spreading the love!” And via this process we have some good names here tonight spreading the love!
We had 97 business names, and we had to get down to a medium- list, that was the easiest part of this whole process. We went through the normal routes, obviously annual reports and other business publications.
How did we ditch them? One example: a business that emphasised (amongst other factors) its commitment to empowering women into more senior roles. Further investigation showed clearly the photo gallery of their board, senior executive et al had only one ‘enabled’ woman compared to the overwhelming number of white middle aged men. We therefore used the excellent and well known Kiwi scientific process: the Tui slogan “Yeah, right!”
Then with our medium listers we checked out the words that end with ‘y’, “strategy, policy, clarity and of course humility. You all get it… working with social issues isn’t a big brag or opportunity to show how wonderful you are.
The panels had 18 community leaders from all over NZ and although we one got waylaid on the way, 17 they did an excellent job for which we thank them.
To survive to make the GBE standard they checked out your public statement of what you do in this space, programmes/projects, strategy if published and read reports ( if available.) We were all keen to see what you’re sharing and reporting.
What the panels returned was a goldmine of information. The results this year were tighter than ever and the fact that the panelists used .5’s in their scoring showed the difficulty they had to differentiate.
They were much more hard-line this year and a number of themes were evident.
Sponsorships applications
- Difficulty with guidelines for sponsorship. Broken links, hard to understand, over emphasis on what the benefit to the business was, unsure how much they could apply for. Incredibly long waits for responses.
- The sponsorship guide is very wordy and corporate. A version (YouTube) would be great with real examples. This may reach more of the most vulnerable.
NZ inclusion
- I look forward to more NZ inclusion.
- Some kind of dashboard for NZ use would be great.
- Would like to see more local activity.
- Detailed, but can be difficult to see NZ specific info.
Reporting (There were 28 specific comments )
- “Positive outcomes from these programmes in Australia but research / impact reporting is lacking for NZ which I think is important.
- “Noted that they are involved in community projects, although not mentioned in their report so hard to judge without reporting.
- “No annual report I could see.
- “It would be good to see if the aims and objectives are being met, i.e. how much money does get distributed to individual projects they have funded.
- “Outcomes: Potentially significant. Hard to tell without direct reporting.
From this, we shall write a report that will be published later this yeae, if any business would like to sponsor this piece of work we would be grateful.
So those were the challenges and hurdles and if you have made it through this far you’ve obviously been doing something right! We will find out shortly….
BACS has been billited with The Stanley East Company since its inception.
Julie Donvin-Irons is the Director and Founder of BACS.