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Ever wish the work culture at your company was a bit more meaningful? Imagine if you went to work somewhere where values mattered and people bonded over them. A workplace that cared about our world and the people in it as well as business success, so mutual respect and social and environmental respect ruled instead of corporate inertia and cynicism. A work setting where everyone from senior management to new recruits felt and transmitted this optimism. Meet the Doing Good Model (DGM)!
Goodnet caught up with the DGM’s CEO, Efrat Shaked, and Sales & Marketing Manager, Ofir Halali, to learn more about a refreshing new way of working.
A corporate consultancy aiming to shake things up!
The DGM team are corporate consultants with a difference. As nurturers of a strategic, value-based leadership, they get that employees in today’s post-Pandemic workforce are looking for something more than just good pay and conditions. Even CSR programs can sometimes feel external to the staff’s day-to-day working lives, so are not always enough to transform work culture.
As Shaked and Halali explain, in essence, the DGM understands the connection between doing good and good business. In fact, they reveal, the Model’s slogan is “Doing good is good business”.
On the ground, they reveal, the DGM has proved this connection many times over in several industries and now in more countries. If companies train their staff to take the value-led approach to heart, from senior management to their employees,their consumers and stakeholders too, are more likely to be genuinely engaged and in sync with company vision, and to feel fulfilled and happier.
The Doing Good Model vision and method
On the day Goodnet spoke to Shaked and Halali, they talked about how they are newly working with an established company that wants to redefine its vision and values. The CEO feels it’s time to update the company’s vision. Belief isn’t enough. They need to do things and to be the thing they believe in.
So what is the DGM exactly? It is a vision that is based on 13 universal elements for doing good as shown in the image below. At the core, are ripples of impact, the individual, the organization and society and the environment. This approach also maintains that the true assimilation of new values is only achievable when the dimensions of being, believing and doing combine together to become aligned. All the strands are carefully woven together in a transformative process to optimize its successful implementation.
Or as the DGM website outlines, “The DGM is a sustainable value-based business model for positive creation worldwide. It is a practical day-to-day tool for integrating values at the core of businesses, nonprofit organizations, communities, and individuals. DGM combines 13 fundamental human elements for the benefit of society, economy, and ecology.”
The DGM offers a variety of in the field and online programs. Its “Purposeful Managers Program”,for instance, takes DGM as the framework to explain how to bring meaning and purpose management into the workplace. DGM Executive Chairman, David Arison, explains that each of the sessions within it are “specifically curated".
“We first empower the individual, then the organization, and then impact society.” Arison believes that we need to develop soft skills like empathy, understanding, better understanding and communication, to understand our gut feelings when we are making strategic decisions.
As Shaked and Halali explain, it’s good to start “top down” so managers are really involved and become ambassadors for the DGM. There are staff who act as focal points, but ultimately, all the staff are key actors in what is actually a change management process.
Shaked explains this worldview beautifully, when she says: “We are not consultants, we are working for and with them. We work to fit the DNA in the organization. We want our understanding assimilated by the people AND the organization.”
(Image courtesy of the Doing Good Model)
Resonating with the post-Pandemic zeitgeist
Just a fortnight before Goonet spoke to the Doing Good Model team, they had broadcast a very well received podcast looking at why employees leave. This is a time, remember, when the uphill search for valuable and loyal employees is headline news. Emerging from the Pandemic period, Shaked reiterates how salary isn’t enough. Employees today are searching for something deeper and more meaningful in their jobs for themselves as human beings and as employees.
In working with companies today, the DGM works to foster a new state of mind, or consciousness that starts in each individual person. As Shaked explains: “It’s a whole world that starts with every person. My personal values affect my mindset, behavior and influence the organization. If I bring integrity, this will influence the organizational culture in which we work with people. We have different styles and we need to give people room for expression. This initiative starts with people but the organization too must have vision and values like sustainability, positivity, positive language that reflects its people.”
Shaked points out that these values can be business-specific too. If we’re looking at manufacturing, for instance, we are also zooming in on values like sourcing and transparency.
An interesting backstory and ambitious future goals for this thought leader and consultancy
There’s a moving anecdote about the DGM’s origins at another time in recent history when people encountered uncertainty; “The Great Recession” of 2008. Just after it, Shari Arison, businesswoman and philanthropist, and founder of Good Deeds Day was sitting around a table with various CEOs. She was convinced that the resilience of the Arison Group through this financial tsunami was due to its deep-running values and vision. This spurred her to work with a team of academics to define the holistic value – based perception that drove the business. And it is these values that form the core of the DGM.
Looking ahead, the DGM isn’t shying away from setting itself some ambitious goals of its own. Despite the complexities of measuring transformational change and value shifts, for instance, the team have recently started measuring six dimensions of individual, organizational and social impact using more then 130 innovative indicators.
Naturally, consultancies are focused on anticipating obstacles and the DGM is no different. Shaked speaks about the importance of being aware of the gaps between belief and doing as something critical. “We don’t want values to be a poster on the wall. We want a company to bring this to all stakeholders from employees to supplies, from the local community to the media and regulators too.” she says.
