Corporate Social Responsibility Flashcards
Corporate social responsibility (CSR)
- Varying ways an organization can create value beyond traditional profit measures of revenue and expenses
- Includes such areas as philanthropy, volunteerism, corporate-sponsored community programs, social change, sustainability, corporate governance, employee rights, and workplace safety.
Ways CSR has recently changed
- Expanded definition to include sustainability
- Moved to center stage from being on the sidelines
Strategically aligning CSR includes
- Preparatory research into existing benchmarks,
- Includes:
- international frameworks/guidelines
- Reported results of companies’ CSR efforts and initiatives.
- Includes:
- A CSR strategic development and implementation process.
Triple bottom line
- Approach is called full cost accounting or true cost accounting
- Goes beyond the bottom line of profit and loss
- Includes the 3Ps principle of sustainability
- Shows more of the organization’s total value
3Ps principle of sustainability includes
- People
- Planet
- Profits
The goal of tripple bottom line strategy
- Create a positive ROI in each of the three areas
- Can serve as a scorecard of measures for evaluating if and how to pursue a given product to meet sustainability goals
Social audit
- A formal review of an organization’s social and environmental policies and procedures
- Used to understand, measure, report and improve upon the social performance of the organization
- Resembles 360 as it begins by interviewing all stakeholders internal and external and publishes the results that is available to all participants
Forces shaping CSR
- Technology
- Environmental concerns
- Economic pressures
- Ex: recruiting and paying for CSR
- Sociopolitical factors
- Ex: civil and social rights (same sex marriage)
CSR maturity curve steps
- Compliance
- Integration
- Transformation
A big step is seeing where you are and what steps need tobe taken to move to the higher phase
Compliance step in CSR maturity curve
- Social responsibility seen as cost of doing business
- Response to reguatory requirements or negitive publicity
- Efforts are means to show good citizenship but are not a core corporate strategy
Integration step in CSR strategy
- Integrated in regular business functions
- Products and services are redesigned to be more responsible and sustainable
- CSR is approached as enlightened self-interest
Transformation step in CSR stratey
- Organizations have redefined themslves and their brand to reflect commitment to CSR
- This strategy is used to differentiate them from competitors
HR involvement in CSR
- Culture change
- Corporate strategy
- Organizational effectiveness
- Human capital development
CSR effects what HR functions
- Employee contract
- Recruiting
- Brand
- Engagement
- How people work
- Accountability and measurement
- Training and leadership development
Compliance
State of being in accordance with all national, federal, regional, and/or local laws, regulations, and/or other government authority requirements applicable to the places in which an organization operates.
Ethics
- Set of behavioral guidelines that an organization expects all of its directors, managers, and employees to follow to ensure appropriate moral and ethical business standards.
- Focus on behavior focusing according to the core ethical beliefs and convictions about honesty, respect fairness and responsibilities
Breaches in compliance
Can create legal issues
Breaches in ethics
- Damage public perception of organization
- Hurt brand image - crucial to competitive markets
Ethical universalism
- Standardization
- There are fundamental principles that apply across cultures and that global organizations must apply these principles when making decisions in a country, without regard to local ethical norms.
- Organizations may mistake their home-country ethics for universal values
- Fundamental principles may be expressed in different ways on a local level with different priorities
Cultural relativism
- Localization
- Ethical behavior is determined by local culture, laws, and business practices
- Organizations may violate its core values and weaken its ethical character
- Difficult for those ouside a culture to gage another culture’s norms correctly
Areas of supply chain ethics
- Workplace safety
- Child labor
- Sustainability
How to ensure socially responsible supplier conduct
- Inspect their work sites; interview their customers and employees and members of the local community.
- Seek out evidence that legal and ethical behavior is a top priority.
- Develop a code of conduct specifically for suppliers, and stipulate in the partnership agreement that compliance is a condition of doing business.
- Establish procedures for ongoing reporting and monitoring.
- Create a detailed database to track inspection results as well as actions taken in response to any negative findings for every supplier location.
- Use this information to make subsequent decisions related to a particular supplier.
- Assess the broader risks associated with doing business in specific countries, and develop strategies for minimizing them in the future.
- Proactively provide the same information to other organizations for which you are a supplier.
- Due diligence on all potential business partners.
- Research: ethical vulderabilities of home country, work sites and legal and ethical behavior
Governance
System of rules and processes set up by an organization to ensure its compliance with local and international laws, accounting rules, ethical norms, internal codes of conduct, and other standards
Good governance
- Outcome of assessment of enterprise’s legal, ethical and civic obligations to the communities it serves
- Comes from the top down
- Transparent and accountable to each level and function
- Aims to be ethically internally and externally