Value vs values: placing ethics at the heart of business

Gren Paull at Lilli discuss the importance of purpose-driven businesses and ensuring that an ethical culture forms the basis of organisational strategy

For the health and social care sector, balancing the requirement between financial value and the moral values an organisation upholds is crucial.

The past two years have put ethics front and centre in both the public and corporate consciousness. From the impact of successive covid-19 lockdowns on employee wellbeing, to the moral obligations of pharmaceutical companies and the equity of global vaccination programmes, the interplay between building value and acting on business values has never been clearer.

Sustainability also plays a key role in shaping the discussion around purpose-driven business. Last year’s COP26 climate conference is just one example of how the current situation and a shift in mindset has spurred many UK organisations to turn long-held ambition into operational reality across the board. Another is the government endorsed Business for Health coalition, which has drafted a framework that explicitly incorporates health resilience into ESG (environmental, social and governance) goals.

As such, the gauntlet has been thrown down for companies everywhere to deliver tangible, measurable, and transparent progress across this expanded objective.

But what do businesses stand to gain from ensuring that an ethical culture forms the basis of organisational strategy? 

Purpose drives engagement

It’s easy to be sceptical about this push for values being inculcated into business practice and the measurement of outcomes. But putting purpose front and centre is absolutely the way forward in developing the future of business.

The whole world is becoming more purpose-driven, which is reflected in the way Gen Z and many millennials now expect their employers to fulfil a useful purpose within society and to make profit without inflicting damage. Many people now want to have an impact on more than just the bottom line.

Businesses must now consider the positive impact they can make on society, as their purpose can set a positive example for future generations. But questions of purpose can often be tough: they demand a strong steer from the top, but also a clear role for the wider voice of the team in determining organisational values.

The purpose must be authentic and clearly communicated, and people in a business should genuinely want to stand behind it and truly believe in it, otherwise they will fail to engage.

It is crucial that leaders build a strong, purpose-driven team culture, with people fully unified in their passion and commitment for what you are trying to achieve as a business. As a CEO, instead of having a team that gets the ‘Sunday night blues’, I receive texts and emails from colleagues who are so passionate about their work that they can’t delay until Monday to tell me about new ideas or initiatives they want to pursue.

Once an organisation has discovered its shared values and knows what it wants to achieve, teams work with more creativity, commitment, and productivity to deliver true impact on society, customers and your team. 

Improved productivity = profitability gains

Purpose and profit are intertwined. A combination of factors, ranging from a post-crash drive to restore trust in business, to generational change and new technological tools that have the capabilities to shine a light in areas it wouldn’t have previously now holds employers more accountable , and has driven a step-change in how corporate purpose is viewed and driven forwards.

Modern organisations that adopt and demonstrate a broader ethical purpose are reaping financial rewards from the renewed enthusiasm and commitment of their employees and stakeholders, but also from consumers and customers who increasingly look to products that have a positive benefit and shun those that are slow to react or are caught up in exploitative or questionable practices as they remain solely focused on the bottom line.

Towards a healthier future

For me personally, as CEO, it is hugely important for me to work with businesses that are about more than just revenues and returns to shareholders. Achieving a wider social benefit while being successful is really what enthuses me. Through instinct, experience and shared values, businesses can assemble teams that truly understand the challenges they are addressing, working collaboratively to find the best solutions.

In the health and social care sector , it’s about innovating and creating the technology that will transform the way care can be more effectively delivered in order to make tangible and meaningful differences to vulnerable people’s lives.

As a tech business working in an area where ethics are important, behavioural analytics and training machine learning models are invaluable when it comes to providing more personalised healthcare. And anyone working in any branch of artificial intelligence (AI) needs the right values to avoid biases and eliminate any possibility of service-users being monitored by overly invasive technology.

Our values are what inspires our team to build the best solution to the long-term problems that the health social care sector faces.

By instilling the right values, and acting on them every day, organisations will generate true long-term value for wider society, while building prosperous businesses that deliver for employees, shareholders, customers, and their end service-users.

Gren Paull is CEO at Lilli

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com