Social Value – TOMs

If you are a compact or medium-sized business trying to flourish in the market, you’re sure to have pondered how you can improve the social value of your business. Any company wants to maximise the importance people place on your business and how they view your business concerning the changes it can make for society.

With social media keeping people ever-growingly aware of social injustices, ethics, and harmful business practices, it’s now even more essential than ever for businesses to improve their social value to their best capacity.

If you’ve done any research on social value, you may have come across the often-thrown-around acronym ‘TOMs’. But what exactly does ‘TOMs’ mean? We’ve written this article to break down what TOMs are and how they can be utilised to maximise your businesses’ social value:

What are Social Value TOMs?

When people refer to the phrase TOMs, they’re talking about the National TOMs framework. The term stands for ‘Themes, Outcomes and Measures’ and is intended to act as a standard for a business’s social value within contracts. This means it can be used as a solution to assess and award tenders for ease of use in the public sector.

The TOMs network began after the Public Services Act came into play in 2013. This act served to get public services like your business strategising on how wider social benefits can be secured within their contract. This led to an 18-month period in which the TOMS framework was developed to establish a framework which highlights what good social value looks like within a business regarding public service.

Themes

The details of the five themes of the TOMs framework are as follows:

• Growth and Jobs: This tenet acts to support the promotion of local talent and increase employment
• Promote Local Business: This theme is used to ensure that responsible regional businesses can grow
• Healthy Communities: This tenet places a standard on how your business acts to promote healthy, resilient, and safe communities
• Greener and Cleaner: This theme ensures that your business is on the path to decarbonising and safeguarding the environment through your practices
• Social innovation: This tenet ensures that your business is a conduit for social innovation

Now that the five themes have been outlined, you can see why it’s more important than ever for small and medium businesses to ensure their contracts align with the TOMs framework. Plenty of the themes that are listed are to do with improving local communities through increased employment, business growth and safety. If your business is viewed by the public and the TOMs framework at large as ticking all these boxes, you can maximise its social value in the market.

Outcomes

The outcome comes directly from the themes listed above. There are 35 outcomes which have been devised as practical and deliverable for organisations across any sector or industry. For example, one result may be to get more local people in employment, which would come under the ‘Growth and Jobs’ umbrella. Another example may be reducing air pollution within your business, coming into the ‘Greener and Cleaner’ theme.

Measures

Once you have the set of TOMs that apply to your business, measures will then be selected to judge how your supply chain encourages the desired outcomes from the themes.

For example, you may have decided to reduce air pollution within your contracts. This means you would implement the measure NT32, which is one of the many measures found on the list of National TOMS. This will mean that any bidder on your contracts may be asked how many car miles they are expecting to reduce throughout the contract by using transport initiatives such as car shares or cycle-to-work schemes.

Financial Value

The end goal of the TOMs framework is to work in line with financial proxies, which will then be used to determine the monetary value of the social value delivered in any given project. Values can be localised to account for anything that may be specific to your region while still being comparable to other statistics across different organisations so that there is consistency among these proxy values. This framework is updated all the time to make sure the proxy values which are in use are up to date.

Conclusion

If you’re a small business or a medium business looking to improve their social value, engaging with the TOMs framework is an extremely important way to get a concrete financial value on the social value being delivered within your project.

Not only will it make sure you are falling in line with the 2013 Public Service act, but it will also ensure that you are providing a significant benefit to your local community and the environment within your business practices, giving your company an excellent reputation.