How To Incorporate Ethics & Sustainability Into Business Planning

With more Australian consumers opting to do business with sustainability-oriented brands, it’s safe to say that investing in your corporate social responsibility as a business owner is paramount to future-proofing your enterprise. Gone are the days when all that mattered was the bottom line. In 2024, customers expect companies to be responsible to their various stakeholders, including the public, the environment, their buyers and their employees. 

If you’d like to learn more about how you can make ethics and sustainability a bigger part of your business, you’ve come to the right place. Keep reading for some ways to do just that.

Receive Certification

One way to demonstrate your business meets certain ethical and sustainability standards is to receive accreditations like the ISO 9001 certification for ensuring that your business is operating with quality management systems. Taking measures to ensure that your business aligns with sustainable practices for your industry or with internationally recognised standards like the ISO 9001 certification, can help your business gain public trust, be a more attractive place to work, and perhaps even open doors to business development opportunities that might not otherwise have been available to you.

Because your business needs to meet certain criteria to qualify for these certifications, you’ll be forced to change some of your practices for the better. For instance, in order to receive the ISO 9001 certification, you’ll need to prove that your quality management system is up to scratch and that you can constantly deliver high-quality goods and services to your customers. 

Other certificates like the ISO 14001 focus on sustainability. For these, your company will need to demonstrate an ability to operate in a way that is a net positive to the environment. You’ll need to demonstrate a commitment among your leadership to making sustainable decisions. 

In most cases, you’ll need to renew these certifications every few years. This will help keep your business on its toes: it’s not enough to dress your business up at a single point in time for the sole purpose of getting certified. Receiving and maintaining certification requires a well-thought-out, consistently applicable plan to meet certain standards. 

Intentionality Is Key

Ethics and sustainability can’t be a mere afterthought. Your business needs to treat corporate social responsibility as more than another tool to market to an increasingly ethically conscious public. This starts at the boardroom level: ethics has to be a major consideration when making high-level decisions. 

A great example here is Mount Gambier-based company EcoPlas Australia. Dedicated to making recycled plastic products for local farming communities, EcoPlas Australia maintains a strong purpose with sustainability at its core. Similarly, most successful businesses have ethics and sustainability at the forefront. In fact, there are more Australian companies than just EcoPlas whose whole reason for being centres around a particular ethical or environmental concern. Another example includes bookstores whose goal is to keep books out of landfills, clothing brands that only use recycled materials, and publications that only or primarily publish marginalised voices. 

While your company doesn’t necessarily need to be built around such an issue, corporate social responsibility needs to be more than running a half-hearted recycling programme just to be able to tell your customers about it. When making decisions, consider your purpose as well as how you’re treating everyone involved, including your customers, your people and the world at large. 

Ensure Your Staff Act Ethically

Companies are made up of people. This is a fact that can easily get lost on people, especially when it comes to bigger companies. 

It’s important to keep in mind that a business is only as good, or as ethical, as the people who make it up. It’s therefore incredibly important to ensure that your staff, from top to bottom, are all of one mind when it comes to consciously acting in an ethical and sustainable way. 

One way to ensure this is to make ethics one of the criteria you use when hiring. Ask questions about how they would respond to certain work-related problems and look for evidence of a commitment to corporate social responsibility in their previous work. 

You can also promote ethics and sustainability among company employees by holding regular training sessions. These might involve things like respect for others in the workplace, best practices for reducing waste in business operations and many more. 

Promote Diversity Internally

Businesses and other organisations have a duty to promote diversity within their ranks. This can take the shape of diversity in gender, race, religion, age, disability status and many more. 

One key way to promote workplace diversity is to improve your hiring process. You’ll want to ensure that your recruitment isn’t skewed towards one particular demographic. This goes further than getting rid of blatant racism and sexism: take steps to post job listings in places where people of different backgrounds are likely to look. Another way to create a diverse culture is to make everyone feel safe when working for you.

Diversity is a decision that needs to be made at the highest level. Your company’s leadership team needs to commit to making the hiring process as fair and free from bias as possible and to ensure that your workplace is a safe space for people of all genders, races, creeds, etc.

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In the age we live in, putting ethics and sustainability at the heart of your business is no longer optional: it’s absolutely key to your survival. This can be seen in the fact that even huge multinational companies are trying to position themselves as ethically-minded. 

By committing to making more ethical and sustainable business decisions at all levels of your company, you’re not only setting yourself up for success but also making the world a better place. If you’re interested in doing this, implementing the steps we’ve just gone through in your own day-to-day business decisions is a great way to start.