“Social Value professional” is a relatively new career path, but one that’s becoming more and more attractive to a generation of workforce entrants that wants to work for companies that do good in the world.
But what exactly do today’s Social Value leaders do each day? And what advice would they give to anyone thinking about specialising in this field?
We talked to some of our customers and our own in-house experts to find out.
Where Did Today’s Social Value Professionals Come From?
With social value having only been “a thing” since 2012, it’s unsurprising that today’s senior professionals come from a wide variety of backgrounds, before making a more-or-less natural switch as social value became more of a priority.
Steve Saunders is Head of ESG and Social Value at Hippo, but he began his career through a graduate scheme with a Tier One contractor with a masters’ degree in civil engineering.
Coventry Building Society’s Lynne Crosbie is now their Senior Community Manager, but she has worked her way up in the company – from cashier, mortgage and savings advisor, and branch manager.
Gina Van Dort is a Chartered Quantity Surveyor who worked with Arcadis’ design, engineering, construction and built asset clients before making the move to Social Value Lead for the Places Global Business Area in July 2024.
Our own Head of Social Value Danielle Aberg was a youth worker and then focused on CSR in construction.
And while Vanessa Soames started out in marketing, she built her career and reputation in graduate recruitment and talent management before she took on the role of social value director for Cognizant UK’s public sector and health business.
But as Vanessa explained, in spite of their diverse backgrounds, people who have thrived in the profession tend to have a lot in common:
“In social value industry get-togethers, anyone who’s got a social value role asks where everyone else comes from. There’s no one who’s going to have come from social value because it just didn’t exist a few years ago. So I think what you tend to find is the backgrounds are diverse but you’ve got a group of people who came into it as they just like to do the right thing.”
Tilbury Douglas’ Social Value Co Ordinator Laura Marshall echoes this view:
“We all get into this job because we love doing the job.”
Indeed, everyone we spoke to found that the transition to social value was a natural evolution of what they were doing before.
For Gina, social value had become a part of her work through its rising prominence for clients, which led Arcadis to create her role:
“When I was working with clients from across the public and private sector social value was about what we’re doing on this or that project. But what I can do now is look at the bigger picture.”
She feels that her prior career has suited her ideally to what’s needed today:
“Arcadis needed someone who could take us on a journey who has basically done that through other project delivery or been part of transformation programmes. I understand how we evolve and the industry itself has changed quite a lot in the years.”
Whether they come to social value via recruitment, engineering, mental health, community work, or procurement, Vanessa stresses the importance of learning:
“The skill set breadth needed to be a social value director is enormous, so you’re always going to have someone in the role who’s not got one part of the skills that are needed. But they’re that sort of personality. They do things for purpose and love learning and getting new skills.”
The development of social value as a specific discipline is being recognised more today, with dedicated courses and active communities of younger experts “growing up” in the space.
There is clearly a need for more investment in learning and development pathways for the next generation of social value leaders. But has the time arrived for formal professionalisation?
See what our panel of experts had to say in Thrive’s recent webinar, “Social Sustainability: From Output to Impact”.
Social Value Leaders = Great Communicators
As we’ve seen, social value leaders tend to wear many hats.
They’re involved in writing and refining bids. In organising partnerships and opportunities and running events. In developing corporate social value strategy. In chasing colleagues and suppliers for data. They need to jump around between the different parts of their jobs – usually assisted by relatively small teams for the size of businesses they work in – in a highly agile way.
But one theme that came across very strongly from everyone we spoke to was communication.
While communicating their company’s ESG, sustainability, and social value achievements is a key priority for most social value professionals, they also play a vital role in generating internal buy-in and understanding.
That’s not always an easy task. Laura Marshall explained:
“First of all, we are trying to get people to understand why we need to do this as a company.”
While many corporate boards have recognised that social value has the potential to be a driver of business, getting diverse workforces on board with its requirements can be a challenge – especially if they think it involves “more work”.
Overcoming this perception often falls to social value professionals like Kelly Gracie of VolkerLaser:
“I took it back to basics to explain what social value is, gave real-life examples, made it clear it was things they’re doing already – not extra work. All they needed to do was identify it and let us know about it.”
Getting out among the workforce and briefing people about social value face-to-face has been a vital part of Kelly’s success as VolkerLaser.
But many companies are too big for social value teams to do this. Lynne Crosbie has found an ingenious way to address this:
“There’s eight of us in our team, but we have 3000 colleagues. So as much as we would like to get to speak to everyone, that doesn’t happen. So what we also do is we actually empower one person in every team across the whole of the Society to stand up as what we call our Community Champion.”
This kind of communication – getting colleagues on board and understanding the importance of social value – is vital when so much depends on collecting complete, consistent, timely data from different sites and from third parties.
Feeding that success back to the rest of the business has the potential to generate powerful momentum. Talking about the issue-based communities that have been established at Hippo, Steve Saunders says:
“Being able to report on the metrics that each community delivers against, we can say, well, this is actually your proportion of the social impact that we’ve delivered this year and this is what your community has done and that’s really empowering. And that then gets more people involved. As soon as you say to that group, this is the impact you’re having, they share that with other groups.”
Communication is also an essential part of improving practice. In her leadership role, Gina Van Dort is in a unique position to drive this:
“I think it’s about what we can do better, what we can learn, what we do internally between different teams. But also what we can learn, share with our clients.”
Social Value Professionals Measure and Report
Of course, we can’t talk about communication without mentioning annual reports!
The publication of the sustainability report, ESG report, social value report (or whatever it may be called) is a flagship moment for anyone involved in those activities. It’s a moment to showcase everything that has been done and to tell a wider story about how the company sees its role in society.
For a long time, that meant spending a lot of time collecting, sorting out, and interpreting data.
Data that was often incomplete, inconsistent, and …shudder… stored in gigantic spreadsheets!
But as more of today’s social value leaders adopt the Thrive platform for their reporting, they’re finding that this takes less time – and that more can be dedicated to developing compelling narratives.
Julian Sanz of Mullaley is able to track all his company’s inputs against key metrics, and generate graphics and tables quickly and effectively:
“It’s a really easy way for me just to have a quick flick through, rather than going through a huge amount of data logs that I’ve done, I can just scroll through each job and pick out case studies that I like. So that’s how we put the report together.”
Steve Saunders says:
“The best part about Thrive is the monthly tracking it allows you to do. We can monitor progress against targets on a rolling basis and produce project reports for our clients with their social value KPIs. It’s made the whole process of reporting at contract and organisation levels more automated and easier.”
Kelly Gracie says:
“If our MD needs quick information to show a client, we can just grab it and break the information down however it’s needed. Being able to provide the bid team with accurate, impactful figures to use in tender responses has made a significant difference.”
And Vanessa Soames says:
“What a system like Thrive does for us is, it clearly highlights areas where we’ve got gaps in terms of solutions and propositions for specific MAC’s, because now the system’s shows how many times that MAC comes up, it allows you to future proof and plan ”
We’d like to thank all of the social value professionals who have spoken to us about their experiences at work and with the Thrive platform. It’s been fascinating to see how you’ve all come from such different and varied beginnings to gather around what social value has become today – and to hear just how varied your roles are.
As the discipline matures and as a new generation of professionals come to social value from more established pathways, we’ll no doubt see things continue to change and evolve even more!
Alan Boyce
Senior Researcher More articles by Alan >
