Measuring the impact of businesses on people’s well-being and sustainability

Abstract

Businesses have a significant impact on people's economic and social conditions, as well as on environmental outcomes. This paper presents an overview of the various kinds of initiatives aimed at measuring or reporting on business' impact, or certain aspects of it. It shows that despite the proliferation of information and frameworks to measure these impacts, there is currently no common understanding and practice on how to assess the performance of businesses in different social and environmental areas. Building on the OECD's work on measuring well-being at the national level, the paper aims at better understanding how businesses can impact people's well-being and sustainability. It contributes to, and complements, other initiatives undertaken by the OECD on responsible business conduct and inclusive growth. This analysis is a first attempt at extending to businesses the approach used by the Organisation to assess and benchmark the well-being performance of countries and sub-national regions, in view of creating a common language and improving the quality, comparability, and coherence of information on the impact of businesses on societal progress and people's life.

Social impact measurement for the Social and Solidarity Economy

“…Yet, most existing international standards often do not meet the specificities and needs of social and solidarity economy organisations. This is because they are generally not developed to measure the specific characteristics of social and solidarity economy organisations, such as their hybrid sources of income (Rawhouser, Cummings and Newbert, 2017 [41]) as well as inclusive governance and ownership (Salathé-Beaulieu, Bouchard and Mendell, 2019 [42]). A recent stocktaking exercise revealed that only a minority of business-oriented frameworks addresses dimensions such as work and life balance, personal security and subjective well-being (Shinwell and Shamir, 2018 [43]).…”

“…40 Therefore, the question facing social and solidarity economy entities is not whether to collect user feedback, but how. This has led to the formation of intermediaries, like the Feedback Labs 41 and Listen4Good, 42 who specialise in harnessing beneficiary perception for non-profit and philanthropic organisations.…”

“…https://feedbacklabs.org/blog/net-promoter-score-for-the-nonprofit-sector-what-weve-learned-so-far/40 One example is KoBoToolbox, which is publicly-available for humanitarian organisations and aid workers. See https://www.kobotoolbox.org/41 https://feedbacklabs.org/42 https://www.fundforsharedinsight.org/listen4good/…”

Tourism development and sustainable well-being: a Beyond GDP perspective

“…This implies that social and environmental impacts of firm operations and well-being outcomes should be built into firms' mission statements and business models, rather than being addressed as 'optional extras' (Dwyer, 2018). However, there is currently no common understanding and practice on how to assess the impacts of businesses on people's well-being and destination sustainability (Cazes et al, 2015;Shinwell & Shamir, 2018). Opportunities exist for tourism researchers to extend to businesses the well-being lens that is core to the Beyond GDP approach while exploring the advantages of different types of business models that firms can adopt consistent with this approach.…”

Measuring the non-financial performance of firms through the lens of the OECD Well-being Framework

“…These effects may be enhanced through advertising: a meta-analysis of the effect of advertising on household consumption expenditures showed that acute exposure to food advertising increased nutrient-deficient food intake in children (Boyland et al, 2016[68]; Kunkel, Castonguay and Filer, 2015 [69]). 43 The Product Impact Weighted Accounts framework by the Harvard Business School (Serafeim and Trinh, 2020 [90]) provides a way of accounting for the impacts of products in a broad sense, although its conceptualisation of consumer well-being is narrower than the OECD Well-being Framework.…”