How and why to become a non-profit for a day

When we are talking about corporate social responsibility, it is very important to ensure that there are sincere intentions behind every corporate decision that is made with sustainability in mind. Sure, this sounds self-explanatory: don't go green-washing, because that will not help anybody, it will waste resources and, on top of everything else, might also ruin your company's image in the future. Empty CSR is wrong, and everyone knows that.
However, putting sincerity behind a company's pledge to care for its stakeholders does not come as easily as we'd wish. Since most firms exist for the sake of generating profits, corporate motivations oftentimes naturally conflict with working to improve the society's well-being. People can get greedy, which is especially difficult to control in a firm with multiple employees. The more players there are in the picture, the higher the chances that responsibility gets diluted and, as a result, nobody cares enough to do what is right: There is always somebody else within the company to blame for one's mistakes. This goes true both for having multiple workers under the same roof and for multiple firms sharing the same market.
A good way to isolate your company's profits from your company's goodwill to ensure that both survive and prosper is to regularly devote a portion of your company's time to seeking benefit for the society, while acting as a normal for-profit the rest of the year.
An excellent example of this alternative CSR strategy is Google's 20% time program. Under this plan, Google allows its engineers devote every Friday purely to projects that interest them personally. As a result, creative thinking is encouraged and is not bogged down by profit-seeking, which leads to the extraordinary innovations that we know Google to introduce for the world. Couldn't get more responsible.
Another example of this temporary non-profiteering is to pick a day each month where your staff's performance is measured on a scale other than sales or profits. If you are a dentist, for example, and you own a few offices, offer a prize to the office whose wait in line was shortest at the end of the day. Or reward the salesperson who decreases gas usage per sale from month to month. This is fun to do and can be very rewarding for your bottom line, even though the exercise aims at isolating your firm from its income statement as much as possible for one day.