Four simple steps to your 2020 CSR plan

CSRAre you looking to create a more charitable dental practice this year? Mark Topley explains how to create a CSR plan.

Heads up – at the end of this blog, there’s a free download – a 2020 CSR plan template for you to use to plan your community, charity and environmental work for this year.

A new year and a new decade is here.

Whether that fills you with excitement or dread, there’s one fact you can’t escape (no – it’s not the ‘B’ word…)

Two things that point to this fact loud and clear:

  1. Paging through the January edition of Dentistry magazine, I was struck, but not surprised, by the number of companies, practices and individuals profiling the various activities and initiatives they had done for charity. All laudable, worthwhile initiatives and for me – a former charity CEO – great to see
  2. Scrolling through my news feeds, watching TV and listening to the radio over Christmas, it’s also clear that companies outside the sector are keen to point out their charitable and environmental credentials. Whether it’s Eon switching its customers to 100% renewable energy, Ryanair and Easyjet highlighting their low-emissions fleet and carbon offsetting, or Mcdonald’s emblazoning its use of used cooking oil to power its trucks, it’s clear that both being a responsible business, and showing it, are now big corporate issues.

Changing expectations

We now both instinctively and empirically know that the majority of people expect businesses to be responsible.

They prefer to work for them and buy from them.

In my work as a CSR coach, I find that most practice owners and managers understand this, but often don’t know exactly what’s expected of them, or how to make it work in practice.

I promised to help you plan a response to this, and so I’m going to keep it simple and get to the point.

Dental CSR

There are five fundamentals in dental CSR.

Ethics, leadership, community and charity engagement, environmental responsibility and communication.

To dive deeper on any of these, check out my website and blogs or my free ’60-minute CSR plan’ for more info.

To create a simple plan for CSR, you need to follow the following steps as you consider each of the five fundamentals.

What’s your vision?

What kind of business do you want to be as you think about ethics, leadership, environment and so on?

Try and get something down on paper that expresses some of the deeper values you hold.

As Michael Hyatt says: ‘Vision begins with the heart, but it cannot end there.

‘To be actionable, a vision must also be concrete.’

The next step therefore, is to turn the vision into some concrete descriptions of what it will look like.

These statements aren’t slogans.

They should be clear, specific, and inviting.

Next, you’ll need to assess where you currently stand with each area.

What are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT)?

Don’t be discouraged if your starting point isn’t where you’d like to be.

You’re setting a baseline from which you can progress and therefore not trying to beat yourself up for missed opportunities in the past.

Time to plan

What needs to happen?

List the actionable steps for the next year that you need to take to take you towards your vision.

What first?

What’s the very next thing you will do to get going?

Choose one action for each area in the next month.

This can be as much as spending several hours to launch a project or make a change.

Or as little as spending just one minute reading over your vision again.

Add your first steps and the actions that come after it to the 2020 CSR plan template that I use with my clients (below).

After that – you need to come back to your plan each month.

Set an appointment to review it.

Share it with your team and get them on board.

Imagine finishing 2020 having completed all the aspects of your plan.

You’ll have a happier, healthier workplace, you’ll be making less of an environmental impact, and you’ll have made a tangible difference for the causes you care about.

That’s got to be worth the time this month to plan for?


Available downloads

60 Minute CSR Plan
Free 2020 CSR Plan Template 

Favorite
Get the most out of your membership by subscribing to Dentistry CPD
  • Access 600+ hours of verified CPD courses
  • Includes all GDC recommended topics
  • Powerful CPD tracking tools included
Register for webinar
Share
Add to calendar