1. Introduction

This guide supplements all Break-Even Goal Action Guides by providing specific guidance in three areas:

• Understanding what is in scope: How to set the right company boundary for assessment, and how to determine which people should be considered as employees.
• Pursuing future-fitness in a systematic way: How to design and implement internal controls to ensure policy effectiveness and to track important information over time.
• Considerations for assessment and reporting: How to handle specific measurement-related considerations and how to prepare for effective assurance engagements.

This guidance will be enhanced as we learn more from the successes and challenges experienced by users of the Future-Fit Business Benchmark.

Who is the Implementation Guide for?

This guide is intended for practitioners working with or within companies to integrate the Future-Fit Business Benchmark into day-to day activities, performance assessments and/or public reporting. The guide covers a broad range of topics, and the relevance of each chapter to any one practitioner at any given time will vary.

We recommend that practitioners familiarize themselves with the concepts explained in this guide, so it can serve as a supporting resource as and when needed.

This text draws on guidance from the fields of financial accounting, law and tax in an effort to answer the most common questions that have been brought to the attention of the Future-Fit team.

For some of the topics addressed here, entire textbooks have been written about how to properly understand the issues and apply solutions to different contexts. The reader is therefore encouraged to treat the guidance that follows as just a starting point – albeit one that should offer enough information to begin using the Benchmark and assessing future-fitness in a meaningful way.

The Future-Fit team is continuously striving the make the Benchmark both more useful and more usable, so please do contact us if you have particular suggestions for improvement.

A note on legality

Before getting into specific areas of guidance, one over-arching point is worth stating, and it applies to the pursuit of future-fitness generally. In parts of the world, it might actually be illegal to meet certain Future-Fit criteria – at least at this moment in time.

For example, in some regions, governments may restrict workers’ rights of association (e.g. to form unions) in ways that might make it impossible to meet all criteria with respect to the goal Employees are subject to fair employment terms. While such anomalies are likely to be few and far between, in such cases the company should of course not seek to break the law, but rather to explain why its performance falls short of Future-Fit criteria in those areas.