Being a responsible business means much more than developing important-sounding policies: the key factor is the action that organisations take. Here, the experts offer advice on where to start.

1. It makes business sense.
“This really is a big issue,” says Monica Burch, a member of the board at Addleshaw Goddard. Being responsible makes business sense in the war to find and keep the best talent as workers increasingly demand high levels of corporate social responsibility from employers.

2. Think of your staff.
“One of our major responsibilities is to get our people good work and good experience,” Burch says. That means stretching people, offering them variety and helping them to increase their professional skills. Helena Morrissey, co-chair of Bank of New York Mellon in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, says: “We need to ensure that all our employees are being well-looked after and that we are engaging them as individuals.”

3. Mix things up a bit.
“Recognise your responsibility to your clients,” Burch says. “They want the work that you produce for them to be innovative and imaginative and to come from different perspectives.” Hiring people from a wide range of backgrounds rather than seeking new recruits who closely match existing staff will help to do this.

4. Look outside.
Support staff who want to take part in community and voluntary activities. Addleshaw Goddard gives community work a billing code so that staff know that they won’t be penalised financially for using their allotted two days a year. Warren Feldman, the partner in charge of pro bono and community work Clifford Chance in the Americas, advises firms to choose a cause that resonates with staff. “Invest in an area where your people will be interested and want to help,” he says. “Build long-term, multi-tiered relationships.”

5. Ask questions – and listen to the answers.
“Don’t assume that you’re doing what people want,” Burch says. “Engage with external and internal stakeholders before you make critical decisions,” says Tod Arbogast, the director of sustainable business at Dell. “Get broad feed-back from your stakeholders.” Don’t jump in until you have all the information that you need to make an educated decision. It’s also worth following up your actions a year or two later with more questions to assess their effectiveness, Morrissey says. “You need to keep listening, not just see it as a one-off.”

6. Be fair.
“Where you are giving opportunities such as flexible working you should give it to everybody, not just one group,” Burch says. Aiming programmes at just one group can make its members feel marginalised as well as alienating others. Morrisey advises an inclusive approach: for example, when a staff survey indicated that many women wanted to improve their negotiation skills, the bank decided to run seminars on the topic that were open to all employees.

7. Action, not talk.
“Companies should not just come out with statements all the time, but actually put concrete action plans in place,” Morrissey says. Equally, resist the temptation to trumpet small successes; doing so can create the impression that your organisation is more interested in how things look than in substance. “I would rather that people felt that we were actually looking after them than we won lots of badges,” she says.

8. Break it down.
“Don’t try to solve everything at once,” Morrissey says. “Break it into categories and then look at some specific actions.”

9. Responsibility needs to be applied broadly.
Arbogast says that Dell considers customers, employees, the government and nongovernmental organisations as the four broad groups of stakeholders. “Inside of that we look at responsibility to encompass three broad categories – environmental, social and governance.”

10. Start at the beginning and go right to the end.
When Dell considers the environmental impact of its products, it assess their entire life-cycle: design, manufacturing, customer usage and the recovery and recycling of items once the customer has finished with them.

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