JustMeans is an internet-based platform that is rethinking how companies allow potential employees and outside stakeholders to engage with their brands, their values and with what they stand for. They provide a platform where companies or individuals can come together to the ethics, and values and beliefs with which they choose to experience life or their work.

People in their community are sharing podcasts, job ads, company updates, activities, events, blog-posts and doing a lot more. But overall it boils down to two very innovative and important aspects.

First, JustMeans offers companies a way to connect directly with consumers, their customers or any external stakeholder that may want to discuss ethics with that company — in other words, they offer a very unique social reporting platform for corporations. This is incredibly important, as I’ll mention later.

Secondly, JustMeans allows people to discover companies or corporate environments which are more inline with their own personal set of beliefs - and by creating a way for people to find more meaningful companies, they are letting people find jobs they will love that much more.

We had a chance to meet with the CEO Martin Smith and was pleased to find out that they have based this platform on deep-rooted issues. Hit the jump to find out what Martin’s team is up to.

The problem, Martin explained, is that people are generally working at places that aren’t aligned with their value system - so generally they spend the majority of the time working to make ends meet, and then spend 3-4 hrs/week volunteering in places that are more inline with their belief system, or places that make them find more meaning and satisfaction from their efforts and contributions in society.

What JustMeans has done is allow people to work for institutions where they can leave a positive impact with their specific skillsets and social values at 40 hours/week - in other words create a way for people for spend the majority of their time working with a higher sense of purpose, with greater satisfaction, and with more meaning. This is because JustMeans is actively creating opportunities for people and companies to discover one another’s belief structure.

I was curious to find out how it all works. Martin explained that companies and non-profit organizations are already spending a lot of money right now on Corporate Social Reporting, but these reports are often released annually and get distributed to a limited audience. The value-systems that a company may share within all of its employees, and on the basis of which it prioritizes or analyzes external opportunities, is often not disseminated to all the stakeholders that it should be reaching.

What JustMeans has done is reinvent Corporate Social Reporting - they allow companies to create an online portal over which corporations can report on their activities throughout the year. Corporations can not only share their values-system with the world through these portals, but they can also connect with external stakeholders directly in "networks".

Martin showed me the example of Timberland - who moved from annual CSR reporting to quarterly reporting on key pillars via the JustMeans Timberland Portal. Not only is there a regular flow of information to stakeholders through the online medium, but the company can add interactive components in terms of podcasts or videos, and also get quick feedback from their network and collaboratively plan each quarters’ activities with their consumerbase itself.

Anyone can look at their reports, mine through the data, watch their videos, look at the past interactions of the company with the community, and if they are interested, can start a direct conversation with anyone within the timberland network, which includes a large set of employees from the company, not just official PR or CSR reps (currently 127 people, including people from Ebay, the Center for Corporate Citizenship, and more) - basically anyone who feels strongly enough about Timberland’s contributions can become a part of their network and share ideas and vision.

Many of these external stakeholders in the networks eventually join those organizations as employees, a component that JustMeans then offers on top as Job Advertisements - specifically Jobs related to the CSR function.

I asked Martin why should companies care about demonstrating social leadership as a means of finding better employees? Martin had a great answer - he mentioned that there’s tremendous competition of knowledge workers - i.e. people who want to be intellectually stimulated - and as a fact 56% don’t want to work for someone who’s not socially responsible. Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) is the fastest growing asset-class in the US hitting $2.7 trillion in 2007 Wikipedia quotes that "as of 2007, about one of every nine dollars under professional management in US is involved in SRI". These numbers demonstrate a serious trend.

To attract the right human resources, companies will have to differentiate themselves as effectively as they can. NGOs have to show why they’re so effective in their mission, and for-profits have to show how they look at other things in addition to their core focus.

With the onslaught of the latest information based networks, Gen Y is going to work with one company for 40 years anymore. Simply put, "if they’re not intellectually engaged and making a difference, they’ll work somewhere else where they can be.

Martin also mentioned the leading business schools in the US recognizing that ‘It is important that we have young leaders in our MBA program who understand sustainability.’

I also asked him about socially responsible behavior as a strategic interest - what business value can be derived from CSR activities - Martin said that the Dow-Jones index shows that 75% are intangible assets. CEOs are pretty scared of these shifts - "If McDonalds wants to be around for another 50 years, they dont just want to think about how they fish, but just how the entire fishing industry can be sustainable for everyone".

The message seems clear - if a company wants to be profitable 25-50 years from now, it has to fundamentally rethink the philosophy of how which it operates. Pure capitalism is indeed in crisis.

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