Corporate conscience

Sixteen years after the economic transformations in Poland, the public perception of entrepreneurs is very negative. Seventy-one percent of respondents in a study by the Institute for Public Affairs said that an entrepreneur is above all a person living off other people’s work.

At the second meeting of the Forum for Responsible Business, entrepreneurs discussed various activities aimed at improving corporate images, as well as the need for reporting both the positive and negative practices within a company.

„In Poland, codes of good practices are the so called soft law. The stock exchange can rebuke companies that don’t follow them, but cannot punish them in any way. I believe it’s good and it’s also in line with EU regulations,” said Jacek Socha, deputy president of PricewaterhouseCoopers.

But the companies, especially international ones, try not only to follow codes of ethics, as well as promoting their humane side. Citibank Handlowy, for example, encourages its employees to take part in its voluntary service program. The program’s two pillars are financial education for young people provided in cooperation with the central bank, and the construction of houses for poor families in cooperation with Habitat for Humanity.

It’s not enough, however, to run programs promoting the social responsibility of a company. Entrepreneurs stress the need to report them – and to have a standard for doing so. „As a company, we are often suspected of bad practices, that’s why we started using a reporting standard to be able to prove our transparency at all stages,” explains Roman Jamiolkowski from British American Tobacco. TP uses a different standard called Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and Jacek Dymowski, who is responsible for applying it, explains that it enables the company to take an objective stance on all charges.

„Apart from the financial aspect of our activity, we should also be able to talk about the company’s impact on the environment or social responsibility. GRI enables us to cover all of these issues,” he said.

„Good practices are a good way of introducing new elements to today’s world of business but what each entrepreneur has to bear in mind is that every company’s primary target is to generate profits.” Socha concluded. (kd)

źródło: The Warsaw Business Journal