I've always believed in the concept that business can do good and benefit society as a whole. Business, and big business in particular, has come under a lot of pressure in the last decade over its actions. In some cases this is entirely justified, and the argument should not be about right or wrong, but rather on where the responsibility to stop this lies.
Concepts such as Corporate Social Responsibility and sustainability are an attempt by society and academia to counteract some of the negatives that business can drum up. Initially they were seen as fads by many, and with the economic downturn in full swing it may be that we start to hear less and less about CSR. Indeed, I've already started to hear from friends that it has become increasingly difficult to get sign off for the charitable projects that were prevalent in their firms last year.
Unfortunately, this is in part due to what I would like to call the gimmickisation of doing good through business. During the first part of the decade companies realised that graduates and high quality candidates were looking for more than just a pay packet from a firm, and that consumers were becoming increasingly picky about business track record. CSR as a term became a catchall concepts such as sustainability, environmental protection and donating sums of money to charity in an attempt to paint a picture of a 'good' company. All of this is fine, but a CSR policy should not be satisfied at just giving a bundle of money to good causes - there needs to be some deeper strategy to the approach.
I want to start a discussion on what people think a 'good' business should do. What sort of policies would they have? What would there strategy be? How could they justify making profit at the expense of natural resources? Is this even possible? I'm going to make observations and give my opinion, but I want to know what you think as well. I hope that you will give me good examples of companies that engage with their local communities and work to make things better.
Some general observations of CSR seem appropriate here. What exactly is it? A while ago the Economist ran a special report on CSR that I found very interesting, and if you have a subscription then it well worth a read. It described CSR as being "Just Good Business", and to an extent I agree with this. We shouldn't need a term that specially explains doing good, it should be at the forefront of an executives mind when making decisions. This is why I didn't call this the CSR blog (on top of the fact that there are probably already 100 other blogs with this title).
Despite this I happen to quite like the buzzwords, and think that all three are important in understanding the aims of CSR. Let's break it down and look at it word by word (humour me!).
- Corporate - This implies that it that every employee of an organisation should think about, rather than an individual "Sustainability Department" or the head of corporate communications.
- Social - This says two things to me, firstly it should promote society and help the community, be it local, national or global. Secondly it doesn't have to be boring and involve suits and a meeting room (and perhaps a large cheque!).
- Responsibility - The main part. CSR isn't optional, it is a responsibility of the organisation to promote ethical, beneficial strategies that everyone can get behind.
This is, however, just my opinion. What does CSR mean to you and how have you seen it interpreted in your own organisations? Do you know of or use any good frameworks that help you measure the good you do? What sort of activities does your company perform to support the local community? Do you agree with them? Let me know!
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