Building a business is always a good thing, but building a responsible business is an even higher ideal. However, the term can spin off a wide range of interpretations. What exactly is a responsible business? One useful definition is that it is a business that serves your country, your community, and your employees.
Serving Your Country
Your business serves your country by complying with its business laws and taxation.
Business Laws
While your business may not intend to flaunt the many laws enacted by government agencies, it might through ignorance. Government agencies don’t tell you what laws to follow; they expect a business to find out by inquiring with their public information offices.
There are not only federal laws, but also state, county, and local city or town laws. With a panoply of laws, it’s easy to fail to comply with a few here and there. For instance, if your business has many branch offices, it will be affected by many obscure laws enacted by local jurisdictions that your business may not be aware of.
The best way to avoid ignorance of the law is to actively work with business lawyers to make sure your business is complying with the laws affecting your type of business.
Taxation
Taxation, too, can be complicated. Besides working with accountants, your business will benefit from using applications like Asure Software that help keep accurate financial records and comply with payroll taxes. Software not only makes accounting easier, but it also ensures accuracy. Human error can be due to unavoidable events that disrupt the continuity of bookkeeping practices. Often these errors may go undetected for a long time. Errors can occur when people get hired, when people get fired and when departments become overwhelmed with a massive volume of work and tight deadlines.
A responsible business has to stay on top of income taxes, employment taxes, and state workers’ compensation insurance and unemployment insurance. In addition, a company may have to pay temporary disability insurance in California, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Puerto Rico.
Serving Your Community
Here are 3 ways to serve your community by taking corporate action on behalf of a cause.
- Try a BOGO business model. BOGO stands for Buy-One-Give-One. When a product is sold, some of the money is considered revenue for the business while some of it supports a cause. TOMS Shoes is an example. TOMS buy millions of pairs of shoes for children in Africa and South America.
- Employee volunteerism. Employees are paid to take time-off to volunteer. They may either work on a company-sponsored plan or one of their own choosing.
- Raising consumer awareness. A company can package its products in a way that raises public awareness. Timberland, the well-known shoe company, raised public awareness about the environment by sharing this interest with their customers through the Timberland Nutritional Label. These labels are affixed to 3 million pairs of shoes sold each year. They inform buyers where the shoes were made and tell them about the amount of renewable energy invested in making the shoes.
Serving Your Employees
For a business to prosper, employees have to be engaged. Right now, employee engagement is at an all-time low. According to Gallup, the polling company, the lost productivity of actively disengaged employees costs the US economy upward of $450 BILLION annually.
Here are two simple ways to start engaging your employees:
- Provide able leadership. Leadership has to be capable of offering the workforce guidance on what to do and when it should be done. It also has to offer this direction consistently. The opposite of able leadership is vague suggestions on what should be done or having unreasonable assumptions about how things should be done.
- Involve employees in policy making. Instead of simply creating fiat policies—fiat is Latin for “let it be done”–employees respond best to a more democratic approach. Asking employees what they think or how a policy will affect them makes it much more likely that the policy will be followed when no one is watching. In addition, employee feedback can prune out bad ideas and refine good ones.
Enacting fiat policies is the best way to stir up the rumor mill. When a company implements a policy without explaining the reasoning behind it, employees make up their own interpretations. By informing employees about the bigger economic picture that initiated the policy, apparently irrational policies suddenly begin to make perfect sense.
A Solid Bedrock of Trust
A responsible business is a business built on the solid bedrock of trust. It’s a business the government respects. It’s a business a community is proud to support. And it’s a business where employees like going to work and putting in their best effort. That’s why a responsible business is destined to become profitable. And that’s why it will survive the tides of economic stagflation — high inflation, high unemployment and stagnant demand — that are affecting businesses today.
