Always, there’s a moment when the penny drops.

For me, in comedy, it was somewhere between:

Listeners who are listening will realise Minnie and Henry are talking rubbish.  There are no elephants in Sussex, they’re only found in Kent.  North of a line drawn between two points, thus making it the shortest distance.  (The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler of Bexhill on Sea / The Goons)

and

Why not … collect those little metal bottletops and nail them upside down to the kitchen floor?  This will give a sensation.. of walking on …  little metal bottletops nailed upside down to the kitchen floor. (Design For Living / Flanders and Swann)

The same can be said for CSR, or whatever you want to call it.  There’s always a moment when some word or phrase triggers something in you and that’s what drives you forwards.

For me it was sustainability, although I’ve recently been told that’s passé and business is now all about resilience.

So in this riddle of different CSR meanings, I wonder which of the following floats your boat?

Corporate (Social) Responsibility

CSR is probably the most common acronym, although many drop the ‘S’ so that it doesn’t look incongruous when they include carbon emissions and water usage in their reports, although there is an environmental dimension to social justice in any case.

However it’s also a “beating your wife” statement, insomuch that a company which trumpets its new responsibility programme is implying that in the bad old days it was irresponsible, and if it says it’s always been responsible then the counter can be that the programme is just a PR exercise then.

Ethical business

There are many people out there who know much more about ethics than I and who will never tire (I suspect) of pointing out to me that all our actions are ultimately ethical in nature.

However talking about ethical business as an approach is once against falling into the “beating your wife”  trap, the implication being that businesses either used to be unethical or are now promoting their ethics as a PR exercise.

Sustainability

My own favourite, although many dislike it because of the implication of stagnation and the consequent connection with Herman Daly’s ineptly named Steady State Economy.  However it’s the only one I can see which can fulfil measuring economic activity using items other than money.

In essence it says we should not take any more from the environment than can be replaced naturally or create any more waste than can be absorbed.  By implication this can be expanded to include people’s quality of life.

Philanthropy

For as long as there has been wealth there has been charity and philanthropy is surprisingly common among the rich.  Corporate philanthropy follows much the same lines, with companies giving cash, services or time to any number of good causes from the arts to conservation.

However philanthropy is often criticised for “giving back” what it should not have taken in the first place, thus allowing corporations to continue being driven wholly by profit and nothing else.

Social Enterprises / Benefit Corporations (B Corps)

There is a common misconception that these are charities: they’re not.  They are businesses with shareholders, profits and dividends, just like any other.  However their purpose is not to maximise profits for those shareholders but to maximise the benefit society gets from their services.

Social enterprises are a great way to bring the power of enterprise into the delivery of social programmes.  However their scope is limited and there is little use for them by definition in other commercial relationships with consumers and businesses.

Resilience

The rising buzz word of the business world.  Resilience is all about being flexible and able to meet any future challenge, especially those concerned with climate change.  Implicitly this flexibility is often interpreted as meaning smaller business units which are more embedded within a community and less dependent upon a central management.

Because of this it’s being widely embraced by the transition and post growth movements which seek to

… and finally, its worth also noting: Socially Responsible Investing (SRI),  Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) and impact investing.  These are all tools used by investors to measure and consider which businesses they should invest in, with different

.

As above, I prefer sustainability because it provides measurable and comparable metrics away from financial profit and loss, and I have a real distaste for ethical business.

That said I realise that all of these approaches have their own merits and drawbacks and essentially all dance around the same themes: ensuring business is conducted in a manner which is trustworthy and does no net harm.

^{Picture Credit: canoeCN_4397 / clarita / morgueFile}

 Which CSR meaning floats your boat?

Over to you, Hattie!

The concept of social responsibility is key for corporations. For many organizations, it can make or break public relations, profits, even the company’s existence. Today, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is just as important to the people in the organization as it is the people who support it.

There are many facets of CSR and ways of promoting it. Typically, CSR is seen as the corporation’s responsibility with its business practices, from how sustainable its manufacturing might be to how it reacts to a global crisis. However, CSR is bigger than that.

Larry Parnell, director of the George Washington University’s Strategic Public Relations Program, differentiates between traditional CSR and strategic CSR in his presentation Corporate Social Responsibility. According to Parnell:

“Strategic social responsibility is this concept of doing well by doing good. That’s both operationally, in terms of how you manage your resources. And your people, but also in the community and in the world at large, what kind of activities, programs and undertakings are you involved in that benefit the market that you are hoping to serve. An example of this would be IBM or other technology companies donating used recycled computers to homework centers in cities where access to computers is hard to get for economic or other reasons. And training students on how to use computers and use computers to do science, technology . . .”

Under Parnell’s model, IBM uses employee volunteering to do more than just serve its community. The donations are paired with employees training students how to use the hardware and software, thus making the impact on the community greater and benefiting the company by encouraging the students to use computers.

How, then, do you go about promoting CSR through employee volunteer programs (EVPs) like IBM’s?

Find Your Experts

Chances are, you already have a number of employees who have spent years doing volunteer work or giving their time to a nonprofit. If you don’t know, or don’t know who they are, put out a call via internal communications, letting your organization know that an EVP will be built.

Seek out the employee volunteers who do the most but seek the least personal publicity. These are your true EVP ambassadors. When your EVP is built, these are they people you want to be the face of your company.

Their participation in the EVP serves a dual purpose. It builds participation by drawing like-minded employees to the program, and it builds external PR through the example set in the community by the participants.

The expertise of these volunteer ambassadors is also needed to build the EVP because they are the ones most experienced with this type of CSR, even if they don’t realize it.

Find Their Skills

Once you’ve identified your volunteer ambassadors and created your EVP planning committee, it’s time to decide how you’re going to structure how employees give their time. Corporations that are large and niche-based, like IBM in Parnell’s example, are set up for large-scale volunteer days, or even weeks.

Private organizations that can offer employees paid time off for volunteer days can partner with a single nonprofit. This deeper relationship with a charitable organization is a great way for your business to get involved, as it can last years.

However, if your organization is smaller or encompasses multiple business units, building a skills-based EVP can prove more beneficial for your employees and your community. Skills-based volunteering matches individuals and groups of individuals with charitable endeavors that match their personal or professional skills. If you’re a large engineering and architecture firm, you can, for example, encourage one business unit to volunteer with Habitat for Humanity and another to complete environmental clean-up.

This model EVP will attract more employees to the program, as pairing your EVP with one nonprofit partner can alienate employees who would otherwise participate. Employees want to care about their volunteer experiences as much as their jobs. Letting them choose how they interact with the community. Suggest to the legal team that it volunteer with community justice programs. If, however, they choose to use their skills for a different nonprofit, herein lies the beauty of the model.

Find the Recognition

Employees participate in an EVP for a variety of reasons, but they’re rarely about recognition. Just building an EVP in your organization can go a long way to recognizing their efforts and to boosting CSR within the company.

However, that doesn’t mean your EVP should be without recognition or reward of any kind. Leaving it at, “They do it because they care,” is not enough. Incorporate participation in the EVP into the corporate reward program. Look to the example of how nonprofits recognize their volunteers, and begin a Volunteer of the Month award in your company. Publicize this internally and externally.

If your organization can afford to do so or is allowed to do so, offer employees paid time off to do their charitable work. Offer the financial reward of matching any monetary donations made by the employees. Not only are these matches tax write-offs, they can be communicated to the public as a sign of CSR.

Find Your Voices

Once your EVP is built, it’s time to roll it out within the organization and the community. Plan your roll-out strategically. Depending on your location, find out when volunteers are celebrated nationally, and use that as your rollout month or week. In the U.K., National Volunteers Week is being celebrated for an extended period this year: June 1-12. In the U.S., National Volunteer Month is celebrated every April. Create your own organizational volunteer week to highlight both facets of the EVP and volunteer opportunities within your community.

Share any information via social media channels so that your community can see what you are planning. Once employees begin volunteering as part of the EVP, encourage them to share with Public Information Officers their own pictures and stories.

During large-scale volunteer days, media officers should be made available to document the efforts of employees. This documentation is key to the promotion of CSR among employees and to the community at large. Without it, no one knows what efforts are being made.

Writing for inc42, Kevin Kruse defined employee engagement as, “People give loyalty and discretionary effort to those who foster growth, show appreciation, share a compelling vision and are trustworthy.”

This extends to efforts to engage customers as well as potential employees. Both customers and recruits care about how corporations are impacting communities, not just about products and money. Planning a thorough EVP will be key to CSR and employee engagement.

Thanks Hattie!

Hattie James is a writer and researcher living in Boise, Idaho. She has a varied background, including education and sports journalism. She is a former electronic content manager and analyst for a government agency. She holds an MBA and enjoys local ciders and the outdoors. Follow her on Twitter: @hejames1008

 Promoting CSR & Employee Volunteer Programs

The first part looked at the beautification of business.  Currently all business is seen as being rather utilitarian.  Their purpose, especially in a capitalist consumer-led economy, is simply to get money out of the hands of consumers and into the pockets of shareholders.

It’s not that I agree or disagree with that .. it’s just that all the alternatives to it are similarly utilitarian.  So you have philanthropic or resource-based measurements all of which are about usefulness and efficiency, if in slightly different directions.

Why not, I asked, aim to have businesses which were beautiful as well, businesses which we valued for some kind of intrinsic reason as well as because they produced or consumed something at a certain rate?

The second part asked whether business should teach a man to fish.  What a business does at present is to mark off a little corner of proprietary information, try and make it as inaccessible to anyone on the outside, and then sell access to that information.

Many high paid professions, from banking to IT to medicine, are characterised by this .. they’re not really particularly hard as such, they just contain an awful lot of lingo without which it’s easy to look stupid.

Why not, I asked, turn it around the other way?  Why not find out how to do something and then make it your business to teach other people how to do it?  I’m not talking about education here .. I’m talking about dropping having power over someone as a core business requirement and replacing it with empowerment instead.

Four more challenges for responsible business

These two ideas strike at the heart of what we have come to mean by “business” and (to be honest) make me feel rather unwell when I think about the ramifications of them.

Here are another four I put together for the now sadly missed Sustainability Forum:

1. price your service or product according to how much it costs to produce, not how much the market will afford or how big a profit you can make;
2. innovate don’t copy: there’s nothing wrong with improving, or even producing lower quality versions, but producing something different because it means you’ve produced something new is no way to conduct business.  Yet it’s what a surprisingly large number of companies do.
3. pay your employees according to the value they bring your company, NOT their seniority or even their responsibility.  This is dangerously close to paying wages through profit-sharing, and if you’re challenging the greed of business as usual what could be wrong with that?
4. stay committed: businesses usually disengage with their clients and customers after a certain length of time .. either the contract for services has been completed, the product’s warranty has expired, or something like.  Usually one of the upsides of this “chuck it over the wall and run away” approach is that you get to be paid lots of money to go and fix it when something goes wrong.  Why not stay engaged, provide top quality in the first place and commit to support your client or customer come what may?

Revolution!

There’s a lot being talked at present about the next phase of CSR.  So much is going on it’s quite remarkable .. from cause marketing to sustainable stock exchanges; from integrated reporting through to banking reform.

All good stuff ..  but all about changing the effect of business, not challenging what a business should be in the first place.  Even creating shared value (CSV) is expressed as a means of exploiting the links between society and business, exploitation being the key word.  It’s not so much that the leopard is changing his spots as that he’s decided to paint them green.

It’s difficult to remember that today’s modern stakeholder-driven model of business was invented in the coffee houses of Europe just over 300 years ago but that markets, business and commerce have all been around for much much longer. It was a revolution 300 years ago to sell stakes in a company to shareholders, and it’s a revolution we need now.  Not to destroy business or bind it with government regulation, but to ensure that profit at any price doesn’t continue to warp what good business is all about.

^{Picture Credit: revolution by Chris Corwin under CC Attribution Share Alike License.}

 Putting it all together | Renewing CSR 3/3

Specifically, consumers think businesses have a range of resources available to them, which those businesses should use to positively impact global issues. This isn’t an isolated sentiment. Over 10,000 consumers in 10 countries were surveyed, and the consensus was clear — consumers expect businesses to give back. Businesses that do can gain loyal customers. 47% of survey respondents indicated they are more likely to be loyal to a company that supports social and environmental causes, and 53% indicated they are more likely to recommend those companies and brands to other people.

It’s important to note that while there are specific causes that consumers are passionate about and believe that companies should support in order to drive changes (see the infographic below for the details), consumers also want companies to make internal changes to positively affect social and economic causes. According to the participants in this study, consumers most want companies to:

• Change the way they operate = 34%
• Apply unique business assets = 19%
• Develop new products or services = 16%
• Raise awareness and educate = 11%
• Develop partnerships = 11%
• Make donations = 7%
• Donate employee time/expertise = 5%

Take a close look at the data above. The first step most companies and brands take to demonstrate their commitments to impacting social and economic causes is to donate money or require employees to donate money and time to charitable organizations. Are you surprised to see that the internal changes consumers most want companies to make in order to support social and economic causes don’t include making donations and donating employee time and expertise until the sixth and seventh items on this list?

Businesses should support economic and social causes for multiple reasons. Most importantly, they have the resources to make positive changes, but also because consumers want them to and will reward them with referrals and loyalty. For brands the benefits are numerous. At the most basic level, economic and social causes evoke powerful feelings in people, and tying emotions to your brand can have significant results to loyalty, advocacy, and sales. Never underestimate the power of emotional branding.

 94% of Consumers Think Businesses Should Give Back

In brief, the EU has said it by 2014 it will provide a “legislative proposal on the transparency of the social and environmental information provided by businesses” which apply to large companies, such as those with over 1,000 employees.  Read New CSR Regulation Coming Your Way for more details.

Now, it may have skipped your notice but this month saw the 20th anniversary of the EU’s Single Market (the Maastricht Treaty, when the EEC became the EC).  To celebrate it the EU launched a debate entitled “Europe, Wake Up!  We will only return to growth and prosperity if we complete the the Single Market”, including this video and this Google hangout.

In the best tradition of Hollywood slasher/romcom/fantasy flicks (delete as appropriate) it also launched SMA The Sequel, more properly known as the Single Market Act II.

This addresses several key areas for which the European Commission considers to be priorities for rapid adoption to try and stimulate the EU out of the current economic crisis.  Proposals in these areas will be put forward in 2012-14.

Those areas are:

• transport: integrating rail, sea and air networks to allow freer movement of goods and passengers and implementation of services to cross borders;
• energy: implementing and enforcing new rules to promote renewables and enable cross border markets
• citizens: make it easier for EU citizens to work in another state
• business and finance: revise (ie. relax) insolvency rules and legislate to encourage long term investment
• digital economy: stimulate broadband efficiency and electronic invoicing / payments
• consumers: harmonise EU wide safety standards and legislate to ensure all citizens have bank accounts with clear fees.

On the face of it there’s little in this which directly affects CSR but if you look at it from the wider point of view it is inevitable that the regulatory tendrils of these single market changes will have an impact on it.

Take long term finance as an example, which is bound to have an effect on CSR’s first cousin SRI.  If this is going to involve regulation then how a business’ performance at board level is measured is going to change radically towards and ESG model.  Surely this will require further regulatory action to ensure that performance can be measured equally across all EU businesses?

Whether the UK is in or out of this European State is almost beside the point.  With the EU representing the UK’s largest trading partner the changes will affect us one way or another, and they will affect us all sooner than you may think.

^{Picture Credit: European Union Flag by Yanni Koutsomitis / CC BY.}

 More on Mandatory CSR in the EU