Partner: Atkins

When it comes to adhering to standards, working within regulations, and ticking boxes, companies are pretty great. It’s how they are set up, and it is how they are used to thinking. But starting around 10 years ago, companies and organisations were asked to look at the world, and the work they do, in a very different way.

Countries began to press companies to consider the impact of their work and their decisions on society and the world at large. In the UK, this started with the Social Value Act of 2012, which required people who commission public services to think about how they can also secure wider social, economic, and environmental benefits.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals were launched in 2015 to “achieve a better and more sustainable future for all people and the world by 2030”. And this international drive is getting stronger and stronger as the public becomes increasingly conscious of sustainability. The UK, for example, tightened its legislation and mandated that social value be evaluated for public works tenders.

But companies are struggling to get to grips with Social Value. Assessing it, understanding it is turning out to be complicated. This is at least partly because it is a human thing and sometimes, if not approached carefully, it will not benefit those who need it most.

Doing public good is easy enough, but getting it right, is another thing entirely.

In this article we will learn about some of the things to be aware of, and some of the ways in which companies are already doing better than they expect. But before we put things right, we need to appreciate how important getting the shared collaborative experience right is. Investing in the relationships with the stakeholders determines the outcomes rather than a particular intervention.

The importance of evaluation

Some time ago, an organisation was building an extension to a prison. As part of its social value activities, the team wanted to deliver training opportunities to some of the prisoners.

“It was one of his first kind of projects that was working inside a prison. And so there was a lot of thinking and a lot of talking to the people who worked at the prison about how this could operationally happen, and what were the trades that were going to be most useful to the people who were going to be going through the training,” says Sarah Lambshead, a social value lead at consultancy Faithful+Gould. “A great scheme was set up where the people who were inside the prison who were able to take part in the training course were taught a particular trade that they would be able to take out into the construction world post leaving prison.”

The idea was good, it would give a sense of achievement and potential employment once the individuals re-joined society. Hopefully, it would reduce the chance of reoffending. Everything was great until the organisation came to evaluate the success of the project.

“And discovered that actually, nobody was getting a job in the trade that we’d been training them in. It didn’t matter how brilliantly trained they’d been in that trade. When they came out of prison, no construction company was employing them.”

It was impossible to get a CSCS card, which you need to have to work on a building site, if you have a criminal record. It was only after directly contacting people who had received the training and had gone through this social value intervention that it became clear a key piece was missing.

“And so we then went back and we created part of the programme that enabled them to acquire a CSCS card that was endorsed by the construction company. So that when they came out, they not only had the trade, they also had the ability to get a job and work on a building site,” says Lambshead.

If the organisation had not checked, it would not have found out that its efforts were wasted, potentially for years.

Lambshead adds, “We would be training people up, ticking a wonderful social value box and writing lots of wonderful case studies about it. But would we actually have been having the impact we thought we were having… no. And we only learned that because we talked, and we listened and we refined.”

When the circus comes to town

Michelle Baker is Associate Director for Social Value at Atkins. Her background is in the contracting side of construction, which has a longer history of considering its impact on local communities.

“I remember reading this article that said construction is kind of like a circus. It comes into your town, they set up this this big tent, with these hoardings around, but unlike a circus, you’re not allowed in,” says Baker. “We do rock up and we put ourselves in these communities, but we don’t really get to know those communities.”

This is why ideas such as the Considerate Constructors Scheme have always been particularly interesting to Baker. Now, interest in Social Value is proliferating beyond its traditional base. Partly this has been the result of new legislation and a lot of the experts that are being brought in to manage social value have a similar background to Baker. She even set up a network for these professionals, as she knows most of them.

The field is becoming more complicated as it expands and experts need to find a way forwards. A current challenge is identifying what the current state of Social Value is. Because construction companies are doing a lot already.

“There’s been a lot of reaching back into the history [of organisations we work with] to find this data around apprenticeships, volunteering, donations. It’s taken up quite a bit of time.”

So collecting data to showcase what is being done, and bid-writing to reflect Social Value activities are a current focus. Because often companies will not realise that they are delivering this value already.

The experts are also thinking about how to go about developing some corporate commitments and Key Performance Indicators to gather data against.

Data must inform decisions

Baker is currently working on a project that is trying to decide the location for its primary facility, and this requires some socioeconomic investigation into the needs of the candidate regions, and at the same time whether the potential sites would suit the needs of the project.

“You want to go into an area that is going to boost that boosts their area by giving them jobs, and it’s going to have the right sort of population and the right research and development.”

And the right age demographics. For example, a retirement community would not be the best location to create jobs. One danger might also be the creation of a false town. Artificially boosting the economy of a region that will not be sustainable once the project has completed, resulting in future economic depression.

There is so much data available to inform modern decision-making and the intelligent use of Social Value is absolutely critical for prosperity. And Baker emphasises that what she calls the bookends of Social Value are where we need to focus. The strategy and the evaluation, because we are already very good at “the doing”.

Context must inform decisions

Data is important to measure and quantify, but Lambshead has a different focus.

“A lot of the time social value is weighted at the corporate side,” she says. “And it becomes legislation that the corporates understand, how they have to navigate what they need to do, to win bids. What they need to do to be able to deliver on social value commitments.”

But sometimes it ends up with social value being done to someone rather than with someone. There can be a danger that industry focuses on responding to the procurement questions in front of it and not on the people and communities the project will ultimately impact

Lambshead works to try to bring the private sector to the community, consulting what she calls community experts on how a company can shape its social value offering around what is most meaningful. And these experts can be any number of community-based organisations, charities, government departments. And the earlier this is all done, the better.

“A phrase that comes up for me a lot, which is that prevention is better value than cure. And that the more we can get social value activities upstream, as early on as possible in the design process, the more meaningful they will be,” says Lambshead.

This is because it takes into account the community consultation process.

“In relation to someone like Faithful + Gould, who I’ve just started working for, who were part of the same family that Atkins are, you know, they often go into a project as a multidisciplinary consultant. So they have access points, to projects from before RIBA stage zero and all the way through the other RIBA stages,” says Lambshead.

RIBA, the Royal Institution of British Architects has eight stages in a plan of work. Stage zero is ‘strategic definition’, followed by ‘preparation and briefing’, ‘concept design’, ‘spatial coordination’, ‘technical design’, ‘manufacturing and construction’, ‘handover’ and ‘in use’

“So they have the opportunity to be able to work as designers and architects, project managers, cost consultants from developments that are nowhere near being actually put on the ground.”

So working with a local authority or a developer to ascertain what the project needs in terms of core deliverables. But also being able to have community consultation with as many people as possible that are going to be affected by the development.

“You also need to be mindful that when designing something, if you can understand what some of the challenges already are, in that area, you can design in solutions from the beginning,” says Lambshead. “If you are designing a development that already takes into account ambitions for clean air, for transport, that doesn’t require cars for green spaces, and places for people to sit and to walk and to meet, to gather places where children can be free to play, and are allowed a lot of spaces we have at the moment are designed with children completely forgotten about. They’re not designed with children in mind, and that’s a really good place to start because children don’t have much of a voice a lot of the time.”

If you design for the most vulnerable groups, it often ends up being better for all. If something is designed to be used by anybody, it tends to be a more superior product in the first place.

Quality as well as quantity

Recent legislation has focused on helping bring out the qualitative aspect, alongside that quantitative side that construction and companies in general are so good at.

“I think we all know that that data isn’t what changes minds, and that your data is only ever as good as the story behind it. And I think that that’s where the qualitative aspect that’s now being drawn out of social value rhetoric is really important because bids are now… the procurement side is now asking in its bids for you to demonstrate the qualitative alongside the quantitative.”

And it is really important to be open to the possibility of unintended consequences. Sometimes there will be a negative impact from a decision.

“And it’s really important to be open to that being a possibility, and that that’s then a learning place. And you know how to approach something better the next time.”

Lambshead thinks there has been a substantial change in corporate culture in recent years, as well as from a society that is demanding these new things from business.

“There is definitely a lot of change. And I think that post COVID-19, the last two years have really helped accelerate a movement that was already underway, she says. “There was already a move towards a more diverse and flexible approach to how people worked and who you employed, and what kind of skills were considered important. A more emotionally literate leadership model is being embraced by most organisations now.”

Many things that seemed like obstacles, once embedded, became business as usual. Lambshead also believes the public is more keen to interrogate and demand more from organisations. And it is lucky that there is this societal movement for Social Value, because Sarah feels that more is still needed from politicians. The industry had been eagerly awaiting the ‘Levelling Up’ Whitepaper from Government.

The built environment has so many entry points into the structure of society that it can effect change.

“If you approach social value with its real intention, and what Social Value UK and other think tanks and organisations who are independent, you know, and are trying to help the social value movement, along with lots of other movements that are trying to make this decade of opportunity that we’ve got right now, and some might say “the decade of the last opportunity” that we’ve got right now to truly try and get a handle on how things can be different. I think that social value offers that opportunity, that bridge for the profit centred or the, you know, the traditional models of where power lies, and where people sit within that, it offers an opportunity to connect.”

The only real risks are not starting early enough, failing to communicate, and a failure of imagination.