Trading anxiety for action: How to create a robust social value foundation

Where do you start when creating a social value strategy? What should you be measuring and how do you operationalise it? Creating an effective approach to social value is a complex challenge and the stakes are high, with stakeholders increasingly scrutinising unsupported claims.

Mary-Kathryn Adams is chief executive at Simetrica-Jacobs

Creating meaningful, worthy and deliverable social value strategies can be overwhelming and frustrating. When working alongside most of our clients, we’re increasingly witnessing first-hand just how challenging it can be to navigate this space.

The main reason for the collective frustration is that there are so many definitions and interpretations of social value. At the same time, the operational side can rely on several different frameworks — for example, environmental, social and governmental (ESG) requirements or the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). On top of that, there are dozens of potential models, tools, frameworks and methodologies to measure and report on social value.

In some cases, social value and social equity overlap with the traditional remits of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on the economic side and net zero and sustainability goals on the environmental side. Add shareholder and investor pressure to the mix and it can cause high levels of anxiety for C-suite leaders and executive decision-makers, both in the private and public arenas, sometimes leading to decision paralysis, inertia or even apathy. These reactions are justified, as even though clients begin with the best intentions, this is an increasingly nebulous space.

At Simetrica-Jacobs, we recognise that these terminologies are complementary and layered. So, we focus on helping businesses, companies and geographies define what social value means to them. We explore what’s important to them and why, and what evidence they need to inform key decisions and key stakeholders. We understand how and when they need to measure what their business is doing to evidence their impact.

As part of this process, we get asked a few key questions when clients are getting started or looking to update their current approach.

What does a good strategy look like?

Although there isn’t one overarching regulatory framework or set definition, we can use guiding principles to help define and govern social value, whether for public or private companies, organisations or authorities. All decision-making must be guided by improving society. Operationally, this can look like a whole range of different projects, programs or initiatives designed to reduce inequality, improve access or inclusion and/or drive broader benefits for people, environment and economy.

A social value strategy should also be tailored according to the context — whether it applies to a company, a community, a project or even a whole country. While it’s perfectly reasonable for an entity or organisation to use a broad framework to conceptualise social value (such as the SDGs), a strategy is only truly strategic if we’re very clear about creating and applying an appropriate definition, combined with a considered approach to measurement. (And there are frameworks we can use to help with this.)

Choose two or three focus areas that directly link to your commercial and strategic goals. However, your corporate objectives and key performance indicators are framed, social value can and should be integrated into them to sit within the core corporate strategy. Social value can’t be isolated; the closer your social value objectives align with your vision and mission, the better. This makes it much easier to codify social value, making it tangible and simultaneously enabling clearer measurement that aligns with what is important to the business — which is critical.

What should we measure?

Once we know what we want to achieve, how and where do we start with measurement and evidence? I’m a huge believer in Ashe’s seminal quote: “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” This is especially true for clients earlier in their social value journey — it's all about proportionality and pragmatism.

It can be helpful to think about point B: what story does your business want to tell about social value in five years’ time? What do you want to be able to communicate? Who is the audience? What will you do with the evidence you’ve compiled? What decisions do you want to be able to inform? With this vision in mind, define specific areas that will have the most significant impact in year one and year two. Aim for consistency on a carefully selected number of areas: measuring a few things well (and for the right reasons) is much more effective than measuring 100 things poorly.

If you try to run before you can walk in terms of social value measurement, you’ll chase after lots of data and burn through resources trying to measure everything all at once. There is no avoiding it: doing measurement well is resource heavy. While measurement is necessary for long-term success, you need to build this resource proportionately to mirror the growth and maturity of your company’s social value efforts.

You must build your in-house capacity, expertise and confidence in proportion to your ambition. The key here is to ensure your efforts are scaled appropriately to the level of scrutiny and risk associated with the decisions you need to inform.

To use a real-world example, if you're including societal benefits in an options appraisal on a £15M ($19M) multi-year regeneration scheme, the burden of evidence is much higher than it would be if you're informing decisions about the benefits associated with a £100,000 ($126,000) investment.

To be clear, you should be making evidence-based decisions regardless. But in the same way the audit and risk thresholds increase with the level of investment, so does the level of rigour and evidence needed in social value measurement. In other words, you don’t need to conduct a randomised control trial for everything; you do need to be clear from the outset about what level of evidence is proportionate to the decision you’re informing, and the degree of scrutiny that evidence must withstand.

Track your progress, reflect on your learnings, apply your lessons to the rest of the business and then gradually increase the scale of your measurement efforts.

How do we embed and operationalise social value?

Once you have a cohesive strategy that clearly defines what social value means to the business, links tangibly to the corporate strategy and includes a tactical and proportionate approach to measurement, the last piece of the puzzle you need is all about ensuring these elements are underpinned by a strong culture that values human-centred decision-making.

Operationalising social value requires more than a strategy written on paper or objectives visibly printed at corporate HQ. I'm an anthropologist by trade, so I can’t help but emphasise the commitment to cultural change that is required to embed and operationalise social value.

Whether in society or business, we need to be clear that our culture is the inherent ‘code of conduct’ — it’s what informs our behaviours and is especially evident in the decisions we take. It’s how we act when nobody's looking. With a strong culture in place to guide and underpin our behaviours, we can trust that individuals and businesses will make the right decisions and, critically, that they will understand the social, economic and environmental impacts of those decisions.

Make a start, remembering it’s an iterative process

The secret to creating a strong foundation to develop and implement a social value strategy is focusing on people and culture. Arguably the most important point is that true, long-lasting change is achievable when culture, behaviours and strategy align to support human-centred decision making.

Your social value strategy should (by definition) be an iterative, living guide that evolves and flexes around your abilities and ambitions, local community needs and local and wider policymaking; none of these are static. A strategy should actively anticipate these changes with a willingness to pivot and enough agility to continue to remain focused on people, rather than being driven by a focus on reporting the ‘best’ result.

Ready to learn what not to do in creating social value strategies? Look out for the second article in our social value series.