Social Auditing
By Christina Sarginson
This article introduces the Social and Ethical Framework used by Gallant2000 Ltd to complete an organisational Social and Ethical Audit . The Standards and guidelines used form part of the practice carried out within the AA1000 professional code of conduct.
Gallant2000 Ltd has a particular focus on:
- Supporting more effective stakeholder engagement.
- Contributing to specialised standards, guidelines and tools for audit assessment
- Promoting the benefit of an effective diverse operating environment
- Working nationally to break down barriers arising from diverse sectors.
- Building synergy with emerging approaches to intellectual capital and knowledge management and the effective use of Networks.
- Building accountability in all sectors, public, voluntary as well as within the business community.
- Demonstrably enhancing overall performance in business, public and voluntary sectors. Hence our promoting performance not compliance.
Recent years have witnessed an increase of standards and guidelines to support and measure social and ethical accountability (social audit) and performance within organisations The standards cover elements such as stakeholder dialogue, organisational culture, fair and ethical trade, working conditions, human resource management and training, environmental and animal protection, community development and human rights all of these fall in to the social and ethical reporting guidelines.
What is Social and Ethical?
The terms ‘ethical’ and ‘social’ have a number of theoretical and practical traditions in organisational accountability. For the purpose of this article however I will define ethical and social as the following
- Ethical is an organisation’s systems culture and the behaviour of individuals within the organisation,
- Social refers to the impacts of the organisation’s behaviour on its stakeholders, both internal and external.
An organisation’s stakeholders are those groups who are affected by the organisation and its activities. These may include, but are not limited to: owners, trustees, employees and trade unions, customers, members, business partners, suppliers, competitors, government and regulators, the electorate, non-governmental-organisations (NGOs) / not-for-profit /voluntary organisations, pressure groups and influencers, and local and international
Communities.
There is growing recognition by organisations that some stakeholder possess significant influence over them due to;
- Information being publicly available on the activity of organisations and the impact of these activities on employees, shareholders, society, environment and the economy.
- Stakeholders demand higher standards of behaviour from organisations and who organizations deal with in their business the supply chain.
- The legitimacy of these demands are more widely recognised by government, regulators and civil society, therefore gaining contracts in these areas can become difficult.
- At the same time, organisations recognise the conflicts of interest they have with stakeholders, and the lack of consensus between and within stakeholder groups.
This is a dilemma for some organisations and one, which a social audit seeks to address. And whilst it does not provide a prescriptive framework for the resolution of all the conflicts, it does provide a process for organisations to begin to address them, through engaging with all the stakeholders to find common ground and build trust.
By using a social audit we can practically instigate measure, monitor and create a change that matters. To me this is a very exciting approach that can be used to achieve many of the changes needed for us to become a more inclusive society.