If not CSR, What?

Tom Levitt

In a recent blog on this site I may have given the impression that much of what passes as Corporate Social Responsibility or ‘CSR’ is superficial, short term and optional rather than representing the strategic reaffirmation of a company’s mission.

Good. Objective achieved.

If that description does indeed describe your company’s CSR operation then it’s probably organised by volunteers, not by the HR department, and/or it will largely focus on charity fundraising. It could be doing so much more, not just for the ultimate beneficiaries of the philanthropy but for the company itself.

I was speaking at a global conference on corporate volunteering, in Australia, a few years ago. The audience was 500 community organisers and volunteer managers, from business and the social sector around the world. The speaker following me got the biggest cheer when she said ‘We at [name of bank redacted] are scrapping team volunteering days!’

“Too often volunteering days exist to serve the needs of the company and not society”

Why the ecstasy? Because too often such days, involving paintbrushes, litter pickers, teeshirts bearing the corporate logo, exist to serve the needs of the company and not society. If you want to do team building - and only team building - go paint balling. The social sector is not impressed by ‘we volunteered a thousand hours’ or ‘we raised a thousand pounds’ . These are measures of input and not of societal change.

A volunteering strategy in a purpose-led company, or even a business that’s simply aware of its responsibilities towards society, should be a core HR function and not an optional day out followed by team bonding in the pub. Don’t arrange for it to all happen on one day (without very good reason). Do make sure that employees don’t only contribute their time but their skills, too. Make sure that the skills that they use and, more importantly, those they develop through volunteering, are salient to your company’s needs. The volunteer should emerge as a better employee, not just the same one as before but with added warm glow.

A community volunteer once said to me, pointing at the tee-shirted corporate volunteer alongside her, ‘she’s getting paid for this and I’m not’. That’s not the way to look at it. It’s the company that’s volunteering its time and skills here, not the individual. The deployment of time and the development of skills are core HR responsibilities, not matters for the ad hoc CSR committee.

Engaging with the community often starts like so: an employee brings a sponsorship form to work and asks colleagues to help them fundraise. An enterprising manager might respond ‘Yes, and here’s £50 from the company’. Not only has the fundraiser been helped along but a quantum of good will has been purchased, too. And so has a modicum of employee engagement: ‘my employer cares about the things I care about’ is a first, small step along that route.

Why leave it there? Payroll giving enables an employee to give to their favourite cause in a tax efficient way, at no cost to the business. Some businesses encourage the practice through matched funding, a not uncommon practice in the banking world, with the same outcome as above. Or perhaps… if the matched funding is targeted in favour of a charity with a mission pertinent to that of the company then we take another step up the ladder. For example, a house building company might focus its fundraising and other, voluntary, skills-based efforts on supporting a charity for homeless people. Add reciprocal transfer of skills between the two organisations and you’re starting to get there!

“A partnership story worth re-telling”

National Rail and the Samaritans is a well established partnership story worth re-telling. The company pays the charity to train its staff in suicide awareness and prevention. The very act of being so trained gives employees a sense of responsibility and purpose, new skills and qualities, which they pray they’ll never need to use. But they do. 20,000 staff have been trained and almost a thousand suicides prevented. So what’s in it for the company? Every time a train service is disrupted by a suicide there are huge costs to the rail industry. These come directly from the disruption - often including months off for traumatised train drivers to recover - but from associated penalties, too. This is a cost efficient programme delivered by an organisation that knows what it’s for.

Sometimes, especially through ‘Charity of the Year’ or similar, employers invite employees to nominate the receiving charity. Please, no. They will choose the cause that the marketing gurus would expect them to: cuddly animals and suppurating children in Africa - but not asylum seekers, ex-offenders or people with disfiguring disabilities. A relationship with a major company lasting a year can cost a charity tens of thousands of pounds in set-up costs whilst the learning from year one never gets to inform actions a second time around.

There’s been a focus on local poverty recently with the rise of the foodbank, fed by the guilt (and rising costs) that supermarkets feel for sending surplus and waste food to landfill.

Thankfully, we have moved away from regarding employees motivated by corporate responsibility as simply an extension of a charity’s fundraising department.

“Small decisions, but together they can make a big difference”

From the pharmaceutical company that asks the children's charity to help it prioritise future product development, to the business that extends its paternalism from its own employees to those in its distant supply chain, because they’re equally important in delivering its mission. From the SME that decides to pay the Real Living Wage and not just the legal minimum ‘because that’s who we are’, to the corporate that deliberately buys products from a social enterprise, recognising that it’s a sustainable way of doing good by proxy. These are all relatively small decisions; but together they make a big difference. Part of their impact is to make the host companies both better places to work and even - the evidence shows - more profitable in the long term.

As a bonus, you don’t have to buy so many corporate tee-shirts.

Tom Levitt is a former MP, and author of the ‘The Company Citizen: Good for Business, Planet, Nation and Community’. He is also an Advisory Board Member, Centre for Responsible Business at Birmingham University, and co-founder of Fair for You.