92. Four more ways to build an organization according to your values

Welcome back to Spend Donate Invest. This a podcast that is all about how to align your politics and your money. I’m your host, I go by GG, that’s short for Genet Gimja and I’m so glad to be back today. We are going to continue a discussion about a topic that came in from a listener letter. The question was about how to build a socially responsible organization.

It’s an awesome question. Whether you are a startup founder or you are in the beginning stages of creating a nonprofit, it makes a lot of sense to bake your values into the foundation of your organization. It means your values will be more likely to actually exist once your seedling of an idea grows into a fully fleshed out organization. It means that your values are also potentially more likely to withstand economic downturns or other organizational challenges.

In the first part of this discussion, we talked about starting with identifying your specific values for your organization. And once you have settled on those and figured out how to clearly articulate them, there are 6 categories of decisions that we started to go through last time. 

Today we will continue the discussion with 4 more categories: community, environment, governance, and customers.

So today let’s talk through Structure and Employees, the first two categories. Then in the next episode let’s talk about the other categories.

• Structure
  • Ok. One of the first decisions you will make for your organization, is the structure. If it is a for profit company, you could decide to set up a coop for example. A cooperative can come in many forms. The point is just that it is owned by a broader set of people than just a single founder. You might have the ownership be spread across employees like King Arthur Flour, you might set it up to be a consumer owned cooperative like REI. You might set it up to be producer owned like Ocean Spray, or some other cooperative structure. I am going to include a link in the show notes to a website which is concise and clear on this topic. 
  • Something else? Maybe a coop doesn’t make sense for you, that’s OK, there are other structures you might choose for your organization. The point is that you will pick a structure that supports the values that you outlined for your organization. Everything starts with that first step of understanding your values. 
• Employees. The second category of considerations for us to talk through today when setting up a socially responsible organization is all about the employees.
  • Let’s start with your Hiring process. How are your values integrated into your hiring process? Of course, if you are open and up front about your values, that will weed out some prospective employees who aren’t aligned. But you can go further than that. You can incorporate a values check before you hire someone. In addition to evaluating a candidate’s hard skills and soft skills, you can also evaluate the fit between your organization's values and their values. It is an extra step, but definitely less effort to do up front when you’re thinking about hiring someone versus realizing you’ve introduced toxicity into your organization.
  • Pay & Benefits. So when it comes to your employees you can also think about how you will be a responsible employer after they join your organization. I’m talking about pay, benefits, and the working culture. Are you aware of what a living wage is for your area? How do you stack up compared to that? Are your roles scoped out to be an appropriate amount of work for one worker? How do you care for your employees' well being? That can mean different things in different organizations. What kind of professional development opportunities are there for your employees? What is your benefit package? Not just to be competitive in hiring people but as an expression of your values.
  • Safe and Healthy working environment. You’ve thought about how to screen for the right values in your candidates, how to pay them well, and finally, I also want to encourage you to consider what it will take for you to create a safe and healthy working environment for your employees. 
• Community. So when I think about community and how your organization interacts with the community, I start to think about some of the old ways we used to talk about CSR, you can check out part 1 of this discussion to learn more about that. I think about giving back literally to the community, cash, products, time, access. 
  • Philanthropic Engagement. For example, you might decide as you are founding your organization that you want to give away 5% of profits. In a way it can sound very difficult to do that when you’re starting out and resources are tight. But I still want to encourage you to try to do that from the very beginning. For a lot of us, it can be easier to give away 5% of your tiny profits today versus 5% of your much bigger pile of cash some day. I’m using 5% as an example here, the decision obviously is yours. And you can change it! Start with your ideal and then adjust downward if you need to. It is easier than starting small and trying to increase it later.
  • When it comes to community engagement I’m also thinking of all the ways that organizations will try to get their employees involved in the community. For example, I shared the example of going to do Habitat for Humanity build days with my dad’s job growing up. In researching this episode, I was reading in the Harvard Business Review about the Pay It Forward campaign at the Savings Bank of Walpole, in which teams of employees are given $700 to perform random acts of kindness in the community, is another good example. The teams then report back and share what they did with their colleagues. So you get a little bit of that culture building that we talked about before too.
• Environment. The next category of decisions could be environmental. So this can include decisions on the:
  • Sustainability in your own operations- are you adopting green office practices? Do you really need that office? Can you share an office space with another organization? How are you thinking about your office materials, power usage, water usage, etcetera. We have so many chances to make a decision that is aligned with our values.
  • Sustainability of your suppliers. Let’s also think about the ripples out from your organization. How sustainable are your suppliers? Is that another opportunity for you to make some decisions that align with your organization’s values. We are talking about these decisions within the context of the environment, but if your organization’s overarching value is diversity equity and inclusion, you can also be looking at your office space and your suppliers within that lens as well. Again, it all starts with investing the time up front to know what your specific values will be.
• Governance. So this is the next category of decisions. 
  • Governance really means how your organization will govern itself. How will you all make decisions? This is why you have to decide on your structure up front, because if you have decided to create a coop, that will inform how you govern yourself. Your members will be involved in a more democratic way of governing the organization.
  • Within governance I also want to encourage you to think through how you can use transparency as a tool for your organization to be more socially responsible.
• Customers. So here is where you think through how your organization can live it’s values and walk the talk when it comes to how you engage with your customers, your clients. Immediately I’m thinking about businesses who engage in discrimination among some of their clients. The mortgage industry is well known to do this. The banking industry as a whole is infamous for this. I’m thinking about the tobacco industry. And the lottery industry. The real estate industry. All industries where vulnerable groups were targeted. Our health care industry. I will stop naming examples. My point is that you have a wonderful set of opportunities here when you think about who you are targeting with your product or service and how you are targeting them.

For each of these categories, as you think through your decisions, I want to also encourage you to ask yourself how will you know if you are successful? How will you know if you are sustainable in the way that you have planned to be sustainable? How will you know if your workers are paid fairly if that’s one of your values that you’ve outlined for yourself? Is there a regular review that your organization will do? Are you going to self evaluate or bring in a third party? Are you going to seek some kind of certification like applying to become a B Corp or signing a public pledge? And are there any specific metrics that you can tie to your goals? And how will you celebrate those wins? Especially as a new founder, I think you will benefit from building in some wins to celebrate. I love the idea of celebrating wins relating to adhering to your values that you set for your organization. In fact, send me a message if you do this. I’d love to cheer you on.

So to recap this two part episode: starting an organization is the PERFECT time to bake in your values. Start by deciding what specifically you want your organization to stand for, and consider these 6 categories as areas where you can start making decisions today that will align with those values.

• Structure. You might decide on some sort of a coop or another structure that makes sense according to the organization’s values.
• Employees- can you add an component of your hiring process that screens for values that align with your organization? How will you pay your employees in alignment with your values? How will employee benefits reflect that as well? How will you create a safe and healthy working environment?
• Community- how do you want your organization to engage with the community? Is philanthropy a part of your practice? Employee volunteer type of programs?
• Environment- do you have an opportunity to practice green office strategies to reduce your organization’s environmental harm? Do you have suppliers that you can also engage according to your values?
• Governance- how will your organization make decisions? Is there a way to do this in alignment with whatever your values are? Can you use transparency as a tool.
• Customers- who do you target and how do you target them? Is this in alignment with your values? How can you take a values centered approach to engaging with your customers?

Ok, I’ll stop here. Thank you again to the listener who sent in this request for this topic!! Welcome to all of the new listeners that have joined in to hear some suggestions on this topic. This podcast is about aligning your politics and your money. If you’re wondering something, I bet someone else is too, send in your topic request to spend donate invest at gmail dot com.

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Have a great day today! Let’s fight for systemic change while doing what we can in our day to day lives in the meantime. For those of you who are starting organizations this year, all the best to you, I hope some of these suggestions are helpful in guiding your thinking. That’s it for today, let’s talk soon!