One of the world’s oldest business responsibility bodies is asking its members to make much greater efforts on CSR. EP talks to Business in the Community’s chairman, David Varney, about his tougher new demands
David Varney has only been in post for a year, but he has significantly raised the stakes as chairman of Business in the Community.
After a period of consultation that coincided with the UK-based organization’s 20th anniversary last year, Varney has told Bitc’s 700 mostly corporate members who commit themselves to improving their positive impact on society that he wants to see their work on corporate social responsibility shift to a new level. Those that fail to demonstrate they are doing so, he says, will be asked to leave.
Varney, who is also chairman of the mm02 mobile phone company and a former chief executive of British Gas, announced his tough new stance at Bitc’s AGM in London. At the meeting he told members that ‘passive membership will no longer be acceptable,’ and that he wanted them to ‘scale up’ their activity. ‘We are moving from enlarging the membership to enlarging the meaning of membership,’ he explained.
Bitc is not alone in thinking that the time is right for action: administrators of the United Nations Environment Programme’s finance initiative are also threatening to expel heel-dragging member companies, and the United Nations itself has set up an advisory council to look at how signatories to its Global Compact might be persuaded to show greater commitment to its CSR principles.
Varney, who also sits on the advisory council of the think-tank Demos, wants Bitc members to present the organization with individualized ‘commitments to specific action’ in the ethical sphere within the next year or so. Bitc will then make suggestions and monitor the company’s progress against the plan. If thereafter any member fails to develop such a plan, or patently makes little effort to follow one after further discussions, they will be shown the door.
‘The idea is to agree with each business a plan to deliver on their commitment to make a positive impact on society,’ he says. ‘It’s a process that will be tailored to where each business is, and where we hope to see it move to. We will not be saying “march by the left” but we will be looking for organic movement appropriate to the company concerned, and to make sure corporate responsibility is baked into its values. We want to see that they have a plan we can monitor.’
Varney stresses that members will not be coerced into any specific action, but he is clear that the status quo is not acceptable. ‘The expectations of society have moved up a notch and we have to respond,’ he says.
‘We just want them to get to a point where they have a plan with targets to improve their performance. They will not be drawing up an agreement with us, because Bitc is a broker and we’re not in the business of delivering an end result. But we will use benchmarking to see how they are faring, and if members don’t make the effort then they don’t have a place in Bitc. I don’t see the logic of paying to be a member if you’re not committed to doing something.’
While Unep has suggested that it would be prepared to see membership of its finance initiatives fall quite significantly in an attempt to weed out ‘free-riders’, Varney contemplates no such thing at Bitc. ‘I would hope we can avoid that situation,’ he says. ‘We hope that by setting out our expectations more clearly we will get a response. I am confident we can help lift people’s aspirations and that we’re not going to see excommunications.’
Given that one of Varney’s key aims is to increase Bitc membership to around 1000 by the end of his three-year term, it’s hardly surprising there is tension between that aim and the drive for more membership commitment. Some of the larger companies pay six-figure sums to the organization, which runs various programmes to help members structure their CSR programmes. And he has 375 staff to pay. ‘We are always in [membership] recruiting mode,’ he says.
Varney denies there are concerns about potential free-riders in Bitc and says the chief motivation for the tougher stance has been to preserve Bitc’s brand and reputation. ‘We have been a recruiting and inspirational movement for 20 years and we’ve got a brand people draw strength from, so we don’t want to see that weakened. We were happy in the early stages to take pleasure from what the leadership cadre were doing, and to see the rest trying to catch up. But there’s now a sense that if you are too far behind, you damage the brand.
‘We wouldn’t want to give the impression that the leaders are saying anything against the “dunces” I’ve never had that sort of conversation with any member organization. I’d say it is more an awareness that the performance bar has been raised and that companies are beginning to worry about how the performance of laggards will affect them.’