Defining a successful year?
We want to hear your thoughts on what you think the metrics of success for South African companies should be in 2018?
2017 ended a year plagued with news of fraud, theft, scandal and intentional confusion in South African companies, with organisations previously thought to be stable investment no-brainers turning out to be largely smoke and mirrors.
It’s hard to pinpoint who exactly is to blame for this, it’s the fault of a broken system. A system that values profit over everything, and that ascribes value to a company based on quarterly financial performance. A system that encourages CEOs and leaders to make choices that drive profit and put shareholder happiness ahead of everything.
A system that makes what a company does secondary to how well they do, and reduces them to a trends graph on the JSE.
However this capitalist narrative does seem to be evolving. The business section of our bookstores are an interesting place to see this changing zeitgeist, as they slowly over the past year have shifted away from titles telling us how to “build a billion dollar company in 5 minutes” towards ones challenging readers to think about redefining profit, growth, value and how to build inclusive workplaces. At some local business schools they’ve started to offer degrees in inclusive innovation and shared value. And if you speak to leaders of some companies, they are more concerned than ever about the impact of their businesses on the environment and communities within which they operate.
Our hope in 2018 is that the focus of the news will be more on what companies are achieving, the impact they are having, how they are improving the lives of their customers, their staff and the societies within which they operate.
And the stories coming out of 2018 will be those that communicate this shift and inspire change in our economic landscape.
At the GoodWork Society we are deeply curious about the changing ways in which companies will start to redefine their value, and how they will communicate this going forward. We want to encourage more of these conversations and in doing so, contribute to changing the language of how we speak about company performance.
Some of what we think companies should be looking at as an indicator of how well they are doing is:
- How frequently employee wellbeing comes up at board meetings?
- How often leadership raise the topic of being a corporate citizen?
- How many times the customers are invited into the building and asked to give an opinion?
- The different ways in which workplaces are designed to encourage individual working styles?
- How conscious leaders are of external family commitments?
- How healthy or nutritious the food is?
We have a ton of other indicators we think could be added to this list, but we’d rather hear them from you.
So what other measures you think organisations should be looking at in order to measure their success in 2018 and what performance indicators you think companies should be using?
Join our GoodWork Society slack channel to send us your thoughts, and we’ll include them in our GoodWork Society trends report coming soon.
