CSR with Attitude

What CSR is Not

With complex and unfamiliar subjects it can occasionally be helpful to delineate a topic by stating clearly what it is not. Corporate social responsibility is a case in point.

So, let me begin by asking you to take a leap of faith and repeat after me, aloud: “CSR is not philanthropy”. And again, “CSR is not philanthropy”.

It’s Not Charity

The commonest misconception about CSR amongst my clients is that CSR is another way of saying philanthropy. Donate a check to your favourite foundation; send your used computers to an upcountry school; offer scholarships to needy students – do any of these and you've met your CSR quota for that reporting period.

If you do one of these or something similar, your generosity is commendable, but it is just that – generosity, and not CSR.

Understand that I am not knocking philanthropy: it can drive many exemplary social efforts, from repairing birth deformities to providing replacement limbs for land mine victims to educating disadvantaged children, and much more.

Many of these afflicted groups would suffer without the generosity of companies, individuals, and grant-making institutions. But again, this largesse is a demonstration of charity, not CSR.

Erase the CSR-as-charity connection from your memory bank, now and forever.

What Else Is CSR Not?

Community Service! In my experience, the few companies that don't consider charity as filling the CSR niche instead rate community service as ‘The Answer’.

Many companies take one or two days off each year. They bus everyone to Chang Rai or Krabi or Prachuab (oddly, almost never to Sakon Nakhon or Mahasarakham), to hand out cold-weather clothing, to paint a school, or to give away recycled eye glasses. Where they go each year is usually driven by where they haven't been before.

As in the case of philanthropy, community service demonstrates generosity, and in many cases it is constructive. But it is not CSR.

Erase the CSR-as-community-service connection, too, from your memory bank, forever!

Finally, to cap the list of the three most common misconceptions, CSR is not public relations. An effective CSR program could well result – should well result – in favorable PR, but PR is not the objective of the strategy.

Erase the CSR/PR connection from your memory bank.

We've done a lot of erasing, it seems, and perhaps undermined everything most business people believe about CSR.

What CSR Is!

Let's begin with a very general statement, one which I believe everyone can agree: CSR is fundamentally about how business interacts with the community.

There are two corollaries: First, CSR is a process, not an activity. You cannot “do” CSR. How many times have I heard, “we're going to go to Rayong to do some CSR today. We're repainting an upcountry school?”

Just as you cannot do a strategy, you cannot do CSR. It is a process, a policy, or a plan of action for monitoring the community impact of your business and its output, and for attempting to insure that this impact is a positive one.

Real-life examples

You are a transport company. What is your impact?

Your trucks and motorcycles are on the road, constantly. Their noise and fumes contribute to environmental degradation. Your depots may operate 24 hours without concern for the mental and physical health of neighbours.

You are a toy manufacturing company. What is your impact?

Your toys are wooden, and you source your wood from the over-cut forests of north Thailand. More negative environmental impact.

You are a law firm. What is your impact?

Paper. You print out all your emails and briefs. Also, your partners travel abroad frequently, adding to the problem of greenhouse gas build-up.

Oversimplifications, yes, but illustrative in order to get you to thinking about the myriad ways that an organisation's activity may impact the world around us.

Solutions

Given a CSR mind-set, the transport company would begin looking to alternate energy sources for its vehicles, all the while keeping them in perfect tune for optimal environmental impact. It could also plan for new depots to be located in isolated areas where neighbours would not be inconvenienced.

The toy company could switch from hardwood from the north to rubber tree wood from the south. Since these trees must be replaced periodically anyway, the net ecological impact is minimal.

The law firm could set guidelines concerning what should and should not be printed, and it could encourage video conferencing over international travel.

Not Just The Environment

Coincidentally, these random examples are environmentally related. But don't be misled. In the CSR world, we look at four broad target areas: the workplace; the marketplace; the community; and finally, the environment. There is little in a company's repertoire that is not touched upon by the organisation's CSR strategy.

The examples are also workplace focused, and that's appropriate because all good CSR planning begins in-house. After all, the company is a microcosm of the community, a platform upon which to build an exemplary model to be expanded to the wider community.

What Can You Do?

Recall that I referred to CSR as a process. Being a process, there must be an outcome, a measurable objective. Any idea what that could be?

Before I tell you, let me point out a couple of elements common to the examples above – and, indeed, to all effective CSR policies.

First, they begin with the industry you are in and an assessment of how your business strategy and projected activities will affect the world around you. As I am fond of reminding clients, the “C” in “CSR” stands for “Corporate”. CSR is as key a business function as HR or Finance or even Operations. An organisation whose CSR policy is not constructed as an extension of its business plan is an organisation without a CSR policy.

The need for integration is emphasised by a second observation: when you look at each of the examples above, the suggested actions improve the companies' competitiveness, efficiency, and bottom line. This explains why my clients often exclaim, “You can't call this CSR. This is simply good business!”, to which I respond, “Correct! So why haven't you been doing it?”

Get An Attitude

You see, CSR is as much a mind-set as anything else. An attitude. An attitude that is constantly alert for the repercussions of any and all company output.

I promised to reveal the objective of the CSR process, which is a sustainable company... not ‘sustainable’ in the classic business start-up sense, when operations and sales finally come into balance to create a viable operation, but ‘sustainable’ in the holistic sense, where your activities do not result in a net drain on the planet's resources.

Sustainable companies in this sense of the word are poised to last indefinitely. Unsustainable companies, those that are a constant drain on increasingly limited resources, will not.

Which would you rather be?