Clémentine Hazeran has big ambitions: she wants to let customers, suppliers and employees rate companies’ social and environmental policies, to improve ethics and morality in business. This Lyon native has just created Rate A Company.
Extract
What is your goal with your website?
To give power back to citizens and consumers, so they can voice their dissatisfaction but also change things. I want to bring transparency back into business, because CSR is now a real issue. It concerns the environment and social relations within the company, but also its role as an economic player. For example: do companies pay their subcontractors on time? In France we have the same payment terms as in sub-Saharan Africa, which costs us market share. Job adverts are another telling example.
What have you observed about job adverts?
Finance is all about communication these days, and social media is its playground. There are countless fake job adverts. The company’s aim is to gain visibility and reassure investors. At one point you even had to like the company on LinkedIn to apply. The company built up a stock of followers on the cheap. But candidates got no reply 9 times out of 10! That breeds frustration and a loss of trust in the system. Where large companies should be reassuring, they become suspect.
How does your website work?
Anyone can use it. An employee can, for example, log in and report social problems but also highlight their company’s efforts. A customer can assess the service provided. In fact, depending on the visitor’s profile, they are asked different questions: does the company offer environmental solutions for its production, does it hire locally, and so on.
“An employee can log in and report social problems but also highlight their company’s efforts. A customer can assess the service provided”
But only those with a complaint will come forward. And not necessarily the most legitimate ones... There could even be competitors.
We follow the TripAdvisor model. At first there were only negative reviews, but as it became mainstream you got a bit of everything. Today everyone checks that tool before booking a hotel. It is the same for Rate A Company. The more reviews we have, the fairer the picture of the company. And we can ask for an invoice as proof to check whether a customer’s comment is relevant or not. We are not aiming for absolute truth; we measure public perception.
Are you targeting multinationals?
No, every company. SMEs can really showcase their efforts, especially if they make organic products and create local jobs! For now our database is French, but the site can go global.
It sounds like a website that is rather against companies...
Not at all! I personally come from a family of entrepreneurs! There are virtuous companies. But they suffer from the tarnished image of the whole system. We really want to set them apart. What is more, a company that wants to have good practices sometimes struggles to be sure of its subcontractors. In Gabon, in the timber trade, I saw companies that were very respectful of their employees and others that were not. Both had the same label... Finally, this website lets them see whether their efforts are paying off and where to direct their investments to improve.
But when you see how hard it is for journalists to trace industrial supply chains in developing countries, do you really think your website can encourage transparency?
Yes, because contrary to what you might imagine, employees are very free to say what they think, including in emerging countries. And they have mobile phones! Perhaps even more so than in France, where culturally we do not “inform” on others. All they are missing is a tool to collect their opinion, and that is Rate A Company.
Read the other articles about Rate A Company in APEC and PositivR, as well as the CSR event held at our partner Euronews.
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