business

A Living Wage Makes for a Good Business Plan

- Adam Clare

work and smile

Helmi Ansari started a successful business and understands what’s it like to worry about paying the bills – and knows that when you’re stressed about paying bills you’re not focussed at the job at hand. This is why he pays all of his employees a living wage. A living wage is usually higher than minimum wage (min. wage is basically your boss saying they wouldn’t pay you anything but the law says they must) and scales based on location and cost of living from year to year. Indeed, Ansari says he owes the success of his company to his committed employees.

He’s such a believer in living wage that he founded the Better Way Alliance to pressure the government and other companies to pay a living wage. The alliance has quite a few member companies already, including a business school and a brewery!

The message from this group of leaders is simple: being good is good for the bottom line.

“If our staff is focused on how they’re going to put food on the table and how they’re going to pay the hydro bill, they are not going to be really engaged in the business,” Ansari says.
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His company, which employs a dozen people, became the first multi-site business in Ontario to pay a living wage — the hourly sum a worker needs to earn to support a family above the poverty line, given the actual costs of living in a specific area. Ansari pays all his Cambridge staff and contractors over $16.05 an hour, while the minimum rate for his Guelph employees is $16.50.

Ontario’s minimum wage is currently set at $11.40, a figure workers’ rights and anti-poverty activists like the Fight for $15 Coalition say is too low to keep families afloat. The Star has also profiled the impact of precarious work on issues like mental health.

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Conscientiousness Can Lead to Corporate Success

- Adam Clare

Business!
The corporate working world is a tough place and ti’s often assumed that the heartless will have the most success.The myth that that one needs to be like a character from Wall St. in order to advance on the corporate ladder is too common. Instead, you should be conscious of those around you and practice good ol’ empathy. As always it pays in more than one way to consider and respect the needs of people around you.

In fact, psychologists have even suggested that conscientiousness is the single most important factor that will help a person to score a job because conscientious people not only achieve more, but deal with setbacks more effectively. “Highly conscientious employees do a series of things better than the rest of us,” University of Illinois psychologist Brent Roberts told  Inc. “Even if there is a failure, they’re going to have a plan to deal with that failure.”

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Growing the Green Roof Industry in North America

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Green roofs are great! They help alleviate a lot of issues that arise in urban living while making cities more beautiful. There is growing interest in making sure that urban green roofs take off and it looks like it is working.

While other countries like Germany have been using green roofs since the 1980’s, North America has been playing catch up. Toronto, however, is a city enamoured with renewable energy and sustainability. Ryerson’s engineering building on Church St., the new Forensic Services and Coroner’s Complex and Toronto City Hall are all notable examples of green roof early adopters.

A pioneer in North America, the city requires all new builds with a minimum gross floor area of 2,000m2 to include a portion of vegetation on roof surfaces. It also offers a grant of up to $75/square metre to offset the cost of green-roof installation. Similar incentive programs are being instated in Washington DC, NYC and Chicago, but Toronto is the first to actually mandate builders to include a vegetated roof – or face a hefty fine.

And with good reason. Green roofs divert waste, help manage storm water, moderate ‘urban heat island’ effects and improve air quality. They also reduce noise and can save significant amounts of money. In a warehouse complex, for example, the evaporation characteristics of a green roof can lower the inside temperature from between three to five degrees celsius.

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Philosophy is Needed in Corporate Boardrooms

- Adam Clare

It’s not often that you hear CEOs and other executives call for philosophers to be among their boards. In a recent Financial Times article, there is an argument that businesses need philosophers. People who are trained philosophers tend to look root causes and issues that impact whatever it is that they are looking at – something any company should be doing.

The added benefit of having a philosopher in the board room is that their presence can bring a more holistic sense to the company’s (and owners’) place in the world.

Asked to analyse a business, a philosopher would typically start by asking what its deep purpose was: that is, what its eudaimonic promise to its customers was made up of. Then he or she would look at how well the company was living up to the promise, before suggesting new products, services or brand messages that would align it more closely with its implicit promises.
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Letting the odd philosopher into a business is not an indulgence. It would help management think more deeply about what a business should properly be trying to do with the customer’s life in order to improve it. There is (fortunately) no enduring conflict between understanding the psyche and making some money.

Read more here.

Thanks Janet!

Selling Sustainability at All Levels of a Company

- Adam Clare

Every company ought to behave and operate in a sustainable way at all levels of operation. There is an obvious environmental argument for doing this, but some people don’t initially see the economic value. In this TED talk the economic efficiencies of sustainable manufacturing, distribution, and marketing are explored.

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