How can hospitality businesses create a culture of social responsibility?

1 Assess your current situation

The first step to creating a culture of social responsibility is to evaluate your current practices and performance. You can use tools such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards, the ISO 26000 guidance, or the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to measure and report on your social and environmental impacts. You can also conduct surveys, interviews, or focus groups with your stakeholders, such as customers, employees, suppliers, and community members, to understand their expectations and perceptions of your business. This will help you identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in terms of social responsibility.

3 Engage your employees

The third step is to engage your employees in your social responsibility efforts. Your employees are the ones who deliver your products and services, interact with your customers and suppliers, and represent your brand. Therefore, they need to understand, support, and participate in your social responsibility initiatives. You can engage your employees by communicating your vision and values clearly and frequently, providing training and education on social responsibility topics, rewarding and recognizing good practices and behaviors, and soliciting feedback and suggestions for improvement. You can also create teams or committees to lead and coordinate your social responsibility activities.

4 Collaborate with your partners

The fourth step is to collaborate with your partners in your social responsibility endeavors. Your partners include your suppliers, customers, competitors, industry associations, regulators, NGOs, media, and local communities. By working with your partners, you can leverage their expertise, resources, and networks, as well as share your best practices and learn from their experiences. You can collaborate with your partners by establishing long-term relationships based on trust and transparency, aligning your goals and expectations, creating joint projects or campaigns, and reporting on your progress and outcomes.

5 Innovate your products and processes

The fifth step is to innovate your products and processes to enhance your social responsibility performance. Innovation means finding new or better ways of doing things that create value for your business and society. You can innovate your products and processes by using design thinking, which is a human-centered approach that involves empathizing with your users, defining their problems, ideating solutions, prototyping and testing them, and implementing and iterating them. You can also use circular economy principles, which aim to eliminate waste and pollution, keep materials and resources in use, and regenerate natural systems, to design your products and processes.

6 Monitor and evaluate your results

The final step is to monitor and evaluate your results to ensure that you are achieving your social responsibility goals and improving your performance. You can monitor and evaluate your results by using indicators and metrics that are relevant, measurable, and comparable, such as the GRI standards, the B Impact Assessment, or the SDG indicators. You can also use tools such as dashboards, scorecards, or reports to visualize and communicate your results to your stakeholders. You should also collect feedback and testimonials from your stakeholders to understand their satisfaction and impact. You should use your results to celebrate your successes, identify your challenges, and plan your next steps.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?