In these times of social upheaval and unprecedented change in expectations on the way business behaves and never-ending banter about “social licence” it strikes me that it is the time for business to build a broader understanding of “what does this mean?”.
I draw an analogy from the world of positive psychology. An important learning that I had from my interest and study in this area, something that came to me as a real “a-ha” moment is that the absence of having a negative or neutral mental health issues – depression, anxiety or just neutral mental health – neither good nor bad – did nothing towards contributing to positive mental health. I just thought that all these years that staying away from a negative mental state was enough.
But no, positive mental health is something you need to work on, contribute to, build purposely and nourish – like you do with positive physical health. Just because there is nothing negative going on doesn’t mean that you are operating in a positive space.
I’ve observed through my work with management teams across many industry sectors that there is a similar approach or understanding to building a social licence.
The common thinking is if we meet baseline compliance and governance, do what we need to do, keep away from controversy and community issues we are by default building a positive social licence. This is just not true and not what is expected of companies social, environmental and economic behaviour today.
A positive social licence is earned by transparency, going beyond compliance, continuing to update to meet community expectations and by demonstrating beyond the checklist and tick-a-box exercise managed by communications across social media and websites. Indeed a positive social licence – like a positive mental state needs to be deliberate, purposeful and disciplined with a strategic plan to achieve.
Each organisation needs to be true in their internal organisational culture and build this practice from the inside out. That is, if your first community, your employees, are not walking the walking and owning the values of the company then you have work to do.
If you want to find out more about contributing to a positive social licence for your organisation contact us at Collage & Co and start a conversation about understanding where you are on the journey and what more you need to do.