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MANY IRISH BUSINESSES have great ethical and environmental standards - but aren’t doing enough to promote those practices with their customers as part of their company brand.
Bernadette Phelan, from Business in the Community Ireland, said enterprises of all sizes could benefit from looking at their own sustainability practices – then comparing them to leaders in their field.
“Sustainability should be in the DNA of a company,” she told TheJournal.ie.
Fundamentally, it’s about taking responsibility for the impacts that are made in you doing business. Ideally you want to be positive in the impacts you make … or at least be ‘neutral’.”
Many small and medium enterprises (SMEs) already had good sustainable business practices because it made financial and ethical sense, but they needed to get better at talking about those activities to gain a real competitive advantage, Phelan said.
Her organisation, a not-for-profit group which promotes corporate social responsibility, takes a much broader definition of sustainability than its traditional association with the environment and waste.
For them, it covers everything from creating a workplace where staff feel valued, to reaching out to the public through community work.
The organisation recently launched a service aimed at SMEs and here are three major reasons why Phelan said businesses across all industries should be thinking about sustainability:
“A key benefit of sustainability is about enhancing your reputation and your brand – that’s as valuable for you if you are a small companies as if you are a big company,” Phelan said.
That good reputation could be built from doing work in the community, or becoming known as a business that put high value on health and safety, for example.
Phelan said sustainable workplace practices could also be a good way of differentiating a business in the marketplace.
You can see there is a major trend where consumers are buying a product or choosing a company based on that. It has become a mainstream issue – customers expect businesses to be sustainable now, it’s not an option. You need a social licence to operate.”
An added benefit of supporting staff who wanted to do volunteer work is it could expose them to training and skills they might not otherwise get in a small company, Phelan said.
“The other key area (in sustainability) is about your employees, that they work in a good place where they feel valued,” she said.
If people feel valued and they’re in a good working environment, they will be more productive as well.”
Phelan said sustainable environmental practices, as another example, could lead to cost reductions through efficient waste and energy management.
She said there were also key issues around sustainability for businesses in a global supply chain, because end users were demanding high ethical and environmental standards.
A lot of the time (SMEs) are supplying into bigger businesses and we are seeing, across the world, that those companies are increasing the standards required of their own suppliers around their various sustainable practice,” she said.
So what next?
Phelan said the starting point for most SMEs would be plotting where their practices stood now, then comparing them to what leaders in their industry were doing.
“You could be doing more than you think, or there could be opportunities you are missing,” she said.
Organisations like Enterprise Ireland and the Environmental Protection Agency were also good places to look for resources to further help local businesses, she said.
This month, as part of TheJournal.ie’s ongoing small and medium enterprise (SME) focus, we look at business and the environment, and making enterprise more sustainable.
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This case showed exactly what is right with due process.. Mr dwyer got his chance to tell his story, was assumed innocent and the prosecution then proved his guilt. Now he’ll rot in jail and everyone knows he did it
Reality is more gruesome than a movie could ever be.
The jury system relies heavily on the assumed ability of the jurors to be able to comprehend complex legal matters that are sometimes crucial to a case.A juror is not obliged to offer any proof of his or hers understanding of such a matter.That could lead and has done in many cases to an ‘incorrect’ verdict.While the appeal system cleans up most of these errors, I wonder if it is time to test jurors for simple comprehension skills rather than let them lose on long costly trials that lead to long costly appeals….etc.It is the best system to have… A jury system ,But it needs to be reviewed.
Claiming to understand reasonable doubt and actually understanding it are two different things.
What parameters would you use to decide that Alan? Sounds to me like the process of jury selection would be so complex as to be unworkable and appeals more likely to succeed due to technicalities concerning juror selection.
Agree completely with you. The selection should at the very least be based on educational standards.I know that sounds elitist and even snobbish. It is not intended to be so.A very good friend of mine took literacy classes about 8/9 years ago.He had served on a jury and there were requirements to ‘read’ some of the evidence in the jury room afterwards.He admitted that he struggled to do so and could not understand half of what he read.Even the ensuing debate among the jurors was double dutch to him in parts.He said he was to embarrassed to admit this. I do not believe his experience to be unique.
I cannot offer a solution,Though I still believe there to be a problem.
This IS a difficult question. However, having an education is not the same as having intelligence or even comprehension. I know several people with degrees, but little real understanding of their subject. A degree gan be obtained with a good memory, or even using memory tricks. In the Elaine O’Hara case, I do think there IS reasonable doubt. The Master/slave relationship is not nearly as uncommon as many people believe. Dolcett or killing, can easilly be a fantasy, but there is a huge difference between having a fantasy as extreme as that, and actually doing it. I think it is a definite possibility that Elaine took her own life, telling Dwyer where, and that he burried her. That doesn’t absolve him from responsibility though, as I do believe it likely that he pushed her in that direction, and failed to report her death.
It doesn’t sound like the concept of reasonable doubt is very complicated at all to be honest.
On the face of it, no. But in practice it becomes exponentially more complex as more and more issues come into play.
I disagree Alan. Reasonable doubt is exactly that, reasonable. It is a subjective concept that a jury of one’s peers is assumed to understand. That is the whole basis of a jury trial. It only becomes complex when one attempts to explain a meaning or definition around it.
Hope he rots in hell
There is no hell. I hope he rots in his head!
It is not the same as a philosophical doubt…but it is often compared to a doubt about making a major decision e.g. marriage..buying a house…..at the very least you must be pretty sure or happy to go ahead.
He looks strange and was into weird sex = guilty
He doesn’t look strange at all to be honest and plenty of people are into weird sex but aren’t murderers.
In cases like these, most people would prefer to wrongfully convict a weirdo than to have weirdo murderer running free. Smoke and fire. Lots of smoke with this weirdo, hence he is almost certainly guilty!
Wish the media didn’t focus on this case as much as it did.
If you understand what a Theory is in the scientific sense, then there should be no problem understanding the premises of reasonable doubt.
It really is actually simple.
That was a good and helpful explanation. Thanks.
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