Social Sustainability

Businesses large and small can contribute to social sustainability – to improving local and global social conditions of workers, their families, communities and society at large.   There are many social challenges which are barriers to advancing sustainable development, including poverty, unemployment and social exclusion and the social problems related to safety, inequity, health and working circumstances.  Businesses can play a role to address these issues by fostering worker and community well-being, generating many intrinsic and financial benefits as a result. 

The obvious social role of business is job creation, wherein business can directly reduce poverty and promote economic and social development through the jobs they create.  However, global consensus is emerging that businesses have a greater social remit than creating jobs and paying taxes.  Increasingly they are expected to take social considerations into account in how they conduct their daily business and use their sphere of influence in fulfillment of their overall “social responsibility”.  Many businesses have always taken this approach to business; for some businesses thinking strategically and holistically about their social responsibility is a new endeavour.  The result is that more and more firms are incorporating a social lens on their day-to-day activities (their direct impacts), and considering social factors in how they affect those with whom they have a relationship (their indirect impacts).

There are two international resources for businesses seeking to scope out their role in advancing social well-being internally and through their relationships:  ISO 26000, which is a set of voluntary guidelines on social responsibility for organizations, and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which are 8 goals adopted by the international community at the Millennium Summit in 2000 committing nations to a global partnership to reduce extreme poverty.  The MDGs focus on poverty and hunger, primary education, gender equality, and child mortality, among other priorities. You can go to the Millenium Project for more information on the MDGs.

Businesses can use these guidelines and tailor them to the local context, or they can use a “stakeholder approach” to identify their greatest social impacts and opportunities.  In a stakeholder approach, the business can consult with internal stakeholders (employees) or external stakeholders (customers, community members, suppliers, local government and others) to determine their top priorities. 

This section of the roadmap will focus on three aspects of social sustainability relevant to most small firms:  employee relations, community relations and customer relations.  (More information on stakeholder engagement is available under customer relations.)