I did a review of CSR for HR: A Necessary Partnership for Advancing Responsible Business Practices, by Elaine Cohen. I asked her to answer some questions about her book. Here is her reply.
1. Why HR? It seems they have so much to do anyway with the people side. To add responsibility to their plate seems like overload?
The idea is to integrate CSR thinking into the way HR people do HR. It’s not about starting a whole new additional set of activities, but more about transforming the core activities of the HR function so that CSR practices are integrated into existing programs. Initially, this will require some investment to revise policies and procedures, but through the long term, this should balance out and become part of HR’s regular role.
2. How do you educate people in HR about the work on CSR? Seems like a separate discipline?
Yes, CSR is a separate discipline and HR people do not need to be expert in all of it.But as with any other business function, HR people need to have a basic appreciation of CSR,k and expertise in the areas which are directly within the HR brief (recruitment, diversity, reward etc). How do you educate HR people to manage budgets ? To use technology ? To understand business strategy ? CSR is no different. First they must be trained in the general principles of CSR and the way these are changing the nature of the business environment that are working in. Then, they must examine their HR practices from a CSR stakeholder and material issues standpoint.
3. What is the pay off for the business to support such an integration?
The payoff , as with any aspect of CSR, is both in terms of mitigation of risk and creating new business opportunity. When employees are not entirely engaged with the CSR agenda, they make decisions which may cause companies to lose reputation, trust, or money. It is the single things that employees do every day that can expose a company to risk – Novartis paid a $250 million fine for discrimination recently, There are many many more examples. If employees are not engaged at every level, the company is exposed to reputational and sometimes legal risk. On the other hand, there are benefits – increased employee engagement, talent attraction and retention, motivation, productivity, reduced turnover and absenteeism – all these are the results of a CSR-Hr approach, The HR function needs to provide tools and frameworks to ensure that people understand why what and how. People are not robots. Saying that we aspire to sustainability or issuing a CSR report is not what will cause people to really embed CSR in their daily practices. Only a strong change process in the business will deliver a CSR transformation. HR is the function that creates frameworks for change processes. At a basic level, HR needs to understand the business it is a part of. The business environment is changing (to sustainability). HR needs to understand this new way of doing business in order to play a full role.
4. What could HR people do today to start experiencing what you are talking about?
There is some low hanging fruit but in general, its not about today or tomorrow but a fundamentally different approach to doing business. Having said this, setting up Green Teams in a business is a fairly easy and positive start, looking at diversity numbers and checking representation of women and minority groups is another positive step, leading to potential changes in recruitment practices. If the company doesn’t have a code of ethics, it might be a good HR initiative to move that forward, as this is the bedrock of any CSR activity and the start of a culture change in the business.