Page 125 - DMGT553_RETAIL_STORE_MANAGEMENT

Retail Store Management

Notes
The Body Shop is committed to best practice in environmental management and is against
animal testing on cosmetics and toiletries. All groups involved in these issues will be
interested to see how The Body Shop performs. Their objectives may be different from
other stakeholder groups and their measures of success may conflict.
Methodology
The word ‘audit’ may conjure up images of finance and accountancy, but an audit is simply
a method of checking a firm’s progress. How successful has it been compared to its stated
objectives? With so many different interested groups, with contrasting aims and objectives,
this is not as straightforward as it may appear. As with a financial audit, the first step is to
find a suitable, credible independent organisation to verify the audit with its social audience.
The Body Shop worked closely with the New Economics Foundation, a UK based think-
tank, to design and tailor the audit methodology to The Body Shop.
The over-riding challenge of stakeholder, or social, auditing is finding a way to measure
how people think. Some objectives, targets and performances are reasonably easy to
quantify; if, for example, the local community’s objective is to reduce regional
unemployment, then new jobs created can be measured. Shareholders’ dividends,
employees’ wages or customer complaints are quantifiable, but for many of the objectives,
it is impossible to apply tangible measures such as numbers and statistics to intangible
human thoughts and emotions. It is also important not to let the voice of one stakeholder
drown others. Minority views need to be recognised and therefore the external verifier
must ensure that the correct balance is struck. The Body Shop took a year to research,
develop and formalise its social auditing procedures and since its adoption in 1994, a great
deal of fine tuning has occurred.
The audit involves a mix of focus groups, market research-style questionnaires, face-to-
face interviews and data collection. The information is collected from each of the stakeholder
groups – in all, more than 5,000 people were consulted in the 1995 audit. As with any kind
of audit, the true value can only be measured by what follows, so feedback processes and
future action plans are critically important. The overriding objective of a stakeholder
audit must be to make The Body Shop more efficient, more accountable and more effective.
Therefore, the organisation must be completely open and honest and be prepared to
acknowledge its failures as well as its successes. External, independent verification is also
important if the report is to be a useful policy tool and not merely a marketing ploy.

Stakeholder Auditing
The Body Shop published its first Values Report in January 1996. Inevitably, the report
contained both good and bad news:

Employees
75% of the employees said they were proud to be part of The Body Shop.
71% said they enjoyed their job.

Nearly one in four felt they would have to change companies to develop their
careers.
Franchisees

All the international franchisees sampled agreed that the company takes active
steps to make the business more environmentally responsible.
91% were satisfied with the communications on environmental management and
auditing.
Contd....

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