Total Responsibility Management by Waddock Sandra;Bodwell Charles; & Charles Bodwell

Author:Waddock, Sandra;Bodwell, Charles; & Charles Bodwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

What is clear is that responsibility management approaches must be both systemic and holistic if they are to be effective. Once the decision is made to manage responsibility, the company needs to pay close attention to all of the systems that support its productive processes, as well as its employees, customers, communities, owners, suppliers and other stakeholders.

In taking a holistic approach, responsibility management is once again mirroring earlier changes wrought by quality management. Firms adopting total quality systems needed to ask themselves ‘How do we satisfy our customers?’ rather than ‘How do we make this product?’ They still needed to consider the second question, but only after the first had been answered. Similarly, companies today need to be able to answer the question, ‘How do we meet the needs or demands of all of our stakeholders and remain profitable?’ not just ‘How do we maximise profits for our shareholders?’

Integrating responsibility into the organisation, in other words, is the process of ensuring achievement of a firm’s responsibility vision through organisation-wide efforts; it requires a firm to ask many questions and also stay focused on profitability. In addition to answering the question of what it wants to achieve, the firm needs to ask the primary how question: How do our activities have an impact on our responsibility performance?

Typically, as they did with initial efforts to improve quality, companies first look down the chain, all the way to the suppliers and their actions. The challenge with responsibility management is to look wider and further along the supply chain than is necessary with quality management. Some typical questions might be:

• How do our purchasing systems affect supplier actions?

• How do our human resource policies stand up in terms of their responsibility?

• What are our hiring, promotion, recruitment and lay-off policies?

• What kinds of working condition exist within our own operations and those of our suppliers?

• What will have to change in our marketing plan to take into account changes in our strategic objectives brought about by a new vision of responsibility?

• How do we work with the communities where we have facilities?

• What kind of environmental impacts do our operations have? How can we mitigate negative impacts? Are there ways to move towards sustainability?

• Do our designers take environmental impacts into account in their designs?

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