Sign in or 
Share this
CSR
Call it what you will – Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Citizenship, Business Ethics, or Sustainability – it is here to stay. This month’s topic… CSR: "Company Sugar Reward?" You may well tire of hearing me say this, but if your CSR program does not contribute to your business success, then you’ve selected the wrong strategy. At the risk of offending some of my CSR colleagues, I say again: CSR – like the more traditional business functions such as HR, F&A, PR, and so on – is meant to contribute to the bottom line. If your CSR work does not contribute to the bottom line, or if it is more of a drain on resources than a benefit, then you need a new CSR program. Opting out is not a choice: you can no more eliminate CSR than you can any of the traditional functions – but that’s a topic for another article. To oversimplify, CSR boils down to stakeholder relations: get along with your stakeholders well – your shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, and the immediate community – and you will have achieved nearly every possible CSR objective. Your own employees, of course, constitute one of the most important of these stakeholder groups. A related, often overlooked constituency? Your potential employees! For few are attracted to – and fewer will remain for long in – a company that is perceived to be out of step with the society in which it does business. Studies have shown the preference that prospective employees have for companies with positive images: typically 75% of recent MBA graduates in the U. S. and U.K. claim that working for a socially responsible company is high on their list of priorities. Other studies have shown the importance of similar programs to retaining employees, as well. What are some of the specific ways in which employees – and through them, companies – benefit from a socially responsible work environment? There are many: Improved self-esteem. Management can talk until it is blue in the face about its devotion to the employee. Like the man said, "What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say." So the object is to say little. Act, instead. Build confidence by engaging employees in the process that creates a socially responsible strategy. Use focus groups and other team-building activities. If you already have such a strategy, involve employees in developing the tactics to implement the strategy: Proud people work harder. Strengthened inter-personal skills. Dealing with the same people within the company dayin and day-out is a challenge for only the first month or two of employment. Meeting and having to deal with new people from other departments is stimulating and challenging. That’s what happens in project work. Companies that encourage employees to participate in the outside activities which often characterize CSR initiatives find that their employees adapt quicker to change. They are also less intimidated by new faces, and by new ideas. Improved skill sets. We all like to think that we offer our employees the opportunities to develop their skills and move up within the company. The potential for a career is often one of our favorite selling points. But how many of us follow up beyond the initial employee pitch? When your machinists have to perform accounting tasks and your accountants have to oversee project implementation, as can happen in volunteer activities, both groups get to exercise skill muscles that might otherwise never have been stretched. It is not unusual for employees to discover not only hidden talents, but hidden dreams while working in the community. And they will bring back these talents and aspirations to the workplace. Enhanced team-building skills. Ask anyone who has worked in a volunteer situation and you will learn that the most challenging exercise is in gaining the cooperation of team members. This applies particularly to those team members coming from management who are accustomed to being The Boss. In a corporate situation, The Boss sets the tone and pace of any work. In a volunteer environment, the team sets the tone as a group. The group must be stimulated to do so by a motivating leader, one whose authority rests not on the organization chart but on the abilities to manage and inspire, abilities which can be learned. Confidence in the company; loyalty. Much of what we’ve spoken of up to now has derived from community projects which often comprise a significant portion of a company’s socially responsible activities. But there are also a number of internal programs designed to promote transparency, gender and skills quality, and safety that fall under the CSR umbrella. When these programs exist, and better still, when they are well administered, they have the invariable effect of creating an environment that encourages loyalty and long-term commitment. Sanuk. Here is the uniquely Thai summation of all the previous benefits: sanuk. Everyone everywhere wants to enjoy working, but Thai employees take it one step beyond. Mai sanuk, or "no fun," justifies a myriad of decisions that westerners would not have imagined could be weighed on a fun scale. But when all the elements of an elegant employee CSR strategy come together, the inevitable result will be a company with a sanuk work environment. How important is that? One SME owner confided to me that although margins force him to pay below industry standard, he seldom looses an employee to the competition: he attributes this to having found a way to make the work sanuk. In Thailand, that will earn you a loyal, hard-working employee force. Could there be a more substantial contribution to your bottom line? Alex Mavro is Managing Partner of Thailand’s first total responsibility management consultancy, Social Impact Ventures Asia. He is founder of the Net Impact Bangkok Chapter for CSR professionals and the American Chamber CSR Committee. He frequently speaks and writes on CSR practice in the Kingdom. You may email Alex at almavro@siv-asia.org. ###
|
HoangTung |
Latest page update: made by HoangTung
, Sep 30 2007, 11:04 PM EDT
(about this update
About This Update
CSR
- HoangTung
991 words added view changes - complete history) |
|
Keyword tags:
None
More Info: links to this page
|
There are no threads for this page.
Be the first to start a new thread.
