Addressing social responsibility in healthcare

Overview

Imagine that you have been hired as a consultant to investigate the social responsibility of two companies, TOMS Shoes and Ben & Jerry’s. Your manager finds both of these companies to be inspirational. She would like the SNHU Pet Supply Company to become more socially conscious and has asked you to investigate what Toms and Ben & Jerry’s are doing. You are responsible for researching how their socially responsible practices impact both the companies and their customers. Your manager would like you to make some suggestions about how the SNHU Pet Supply Company can become more socially responsible and make ethical decisions. I attached for your review the original paper on the SNHU pet store

Prompt

You will create an opinion brief about the two companies and suggest a social change for your company. Be sure to use evidence from the course (such as the definition of social responsibility found in your readings) to support your response and suggestions.

Specifically, you must address the following rubric criteria:

• Socially Responsible Efforts: Describe each company’s efforts to promote ethical and social good.
• Benefits: Describe the organizational benefits from adopting socially conscious policies.
• Socially Responsible Policy: Suggest one socially responsible policy that the SNHU Pet Supply Company could put into place, and explain how this would benefit the company and its consumers.

Social Responsibility

Both people and companies may engage in social responsibility. As we saw in our discussion of ethical company standards, it can be hard to distinguish corporate from individual ethics and social responsibility because corporate policies are, at their core, made by people. In this section, we will discuss social responsibility first at the corporate level, then at the individual level.

Ever since the term “social responsibility” entered public discourse in the 1960s, companies have felt pressure from society to behave in a more socially responsible manner. “Social responsibility” is the notion that companies should be concerned about the welfare of society and mindful of how their actions could affect society as a whole.

We know that companies have been known to shirk social responsibility despite claiming to uphold it. To take one notable example, BP (formerly British Petroleum) was charged with gross negligence for violating safety protocols and knowingly failing to maintain the Deepwater Horizon oil rig after the rig exploded in 2010, causing the deaths of 11 workers and precipitating a massive leak of oil into the Gulf of Mexico that lasted 87 days.³⁸ The financial toll of this case totaled nearly $62 billion in stakeholders’ settlement costs,³⁹ not to mention untold damages to the company’s reputation, the marine environment, and the lives and livelihoods of the people living along the Gulf Coast. Cases like this lead people to question large corporations’ commitment to fulfilling their responsibilities to society.

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Ideally, companies should look at four main areas of social responsibility shown in the figure below and act ethically in all of them. Even as individuals, we should be aware of these areas of social responsibility.

Four Areas of Social Responsibility

1. Economic: Companies and leaders need to maintain strong economic interests so they can stay in business. Being profitable and providing value to shareholders are actually part of a company’s commitment to social responsibility.
2. Legal: A company and its leaders have an obligation to follow the law. Car companies, for example, are required to meet certain emissions standards in car production.
3. Ethical: Acting ethically means going beyond mere legal requirements and meeting the expectations of society. For instance, Apple’s policies were called into question when investigations revealed a high suicide rate among workers producing iPhones in a Chinese Foxconn factory. As a result of this newfound awareness, Foxconn raised the salary for workers from ¥900 ($132) to ¥1,800 ($265).⁴¹ This example shows how the ethical expectations (and outrage) of society can pressure companies to behave in a more ethical manner.
4. Philanthropic: This is the expectation that companies should give back to society in the form of charitable donations of time, money, and/or goods. For example, REI, a Seattle-based company, donates 3 percent of its profit and thousands of volunteer hours to nonprofit community groups each year.⁴²

Many believe businesses should go further than the law to act ethically, meet the expectations of society, and donate some of their profits back to the communities in which they operate. And since businesses are run by people, we often see businesses pursuing socially responsible initiatives that are directly connected to individuals within the organization. For example, because the founder of The Body Shop, Anita Roddick,⁴³ cared deeply for animals and the environment, her organization (now owned by Natura) focuses on products that are environmentally friendly and not tested on animals.

More recently, social responsibility has been looked at as going above and beyond even philanthropy. Past ideas on social responsibility implied that the goals of generating profits and benefiting society were inherently in conflict—in other words, businesses would have a hard time making profits without harming society. But this way of thinking has now changed. The concept of shared value, developed by Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer of Harvard University, attempts to dispel this myth by presenting a new view on social responsibility.⁴⁴

Creating shared value (CSV) is the premise that companies and the community are tied so closely together that if one benefits, they both benefit. If companies donate money to schools, for example, both the community and the company benefit, as a better educated workforce can be profitable for the company in the long run.

The idea that social responsibility is something that costs companies money is no longer in favor. In fact, some socially responsible actions can even help a company save money. Small things like turning off computers at night save electrical costs and are the right thing to do from a social responsibility perspective.

Individual Social Responsibility

Individual social responsibility (ISR) is defined as an individual’s awareness of how their actions affect the community. This is an important aspect of leadership, since an organizational leader’s ISR can filter into the organization. ISR can include the following:

 

1. Performing charitable acts.This can include philanthropy, such as donating money to nonprofit organizations.
2. Working for the community.This can include volunteering at a food bank or animal shelter, or donating blood.
3. Supporting issues that affect society.This can include advocating political or social initiatives that help others as well as company policies in support of such issues (e.g., lobbying for stronger child labor laws, purchasing fair trade products, recycling).
4. Observing individual ethics.These can include integrity, honesty, and the “golden rule”—treat others how you wish to be treated. This often entails treating colleagues and subordinates alike with empathy and a sense of fairness.

When leaders within an organization have a keen sense of their individual social responsibility, their ethics trickle down to each level of the organization. Good leaders, with good ethics and good ISR, tend to build socially responsible companies.