By Kirsten Robinson

We all know what it’s like to struggle with creating a balance between work and personal life. But how do you balance work, and…work?

This is a common problem for frontline employees who are asked to carry out CSR objectives that are in conflict with their daily workload—they don’t know how to achieve both simultaneously. And, disconnected from the central strategy, employees aren’t given much reason to care. Engage your staff by creating learning moments where they can discover and share with each other how their actions play a role in achieving company CSR goals.

We spoke with Rosanne Bonanno, Senior Communication Manager, and Ellen Witte, Project Manager, both at TNT, about what worked well for them in engaging frontline employees in CSR initiatives:

1. Facilitate Hands-On Learning. Integrate frontline staff’s core job tasks directly into the CSR-related activity to help employees  see connections between their job and your CSR objectives.
2. Infuse Learning with Fun. Make learning fun and sociable to give frontline employees the opportunity to interact with and learn from each other.
3. Facilitate Peer-to-Peer Sharing. Use audience-centric communication tools to effectively reach dispersed frontline audiences, sustaining learning and understanding beyond the specific activity.

CEC members, get more in-depth details on how TNT mobilizes frontline employees around CSR initiatives, and read excerpts from our conversation with Rosanne Bonnano and Ellen Witte.

By Kirsten Robinson

When it comes to rolling out Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives, it’s not enough to have senior-level sign-off. While 90% of CEOs aspire to embed CSR strategies into business operations, only 50% see their companies as effective at execution.

Where does the performance gap come from? Typically what’s missing is frontline buy-in.  The common approach to rolling out a CSR strategy is a two-step process—crafting a strategy and getting buy-in at the senior level and then moving straight to roll-out. This process doesn’t cater well enough to getting the frontlines on board.  As a result, employees see CSR initiatives as extra work on top of their already full schedules.

To get support across all levels, Ford added a step to the planning process that focuses on involving middle managers early on. We spoke with John Viera, Global Director of Sustainability and Vehicle Environmental Matters at Ford, about how they increase frontline buy-in by:

1. Educating middle managers on CSR strategies at the senior level.
2. Asking questions to surface manager resource constraints.
3. Sharing manager feedback with senior leadership.
4. Refining objectives and resource planning for roll out stage.

CEC members, get more in-depth details on how Ford embeds CSR initiatives at all levels, and read excerpts from our conversation with John Viera.

By Laura Newman

Do you have a good sense for what you stand for as a business? Your mission or vision statement, if you will? Yes? Good. Now hold that thought.

Last week we had the pleasure of hosting 26 companies in our London office in Holborn for a discussion on “Driving the Strategic CSR Agenda.” It was fascinating to hear the various perspectives on how to define Corporate Social Responsibility, focus a CSR strategy, enable internal adoption, and mobilize employees around these goals.

One theme rang loud and clear: What we say is not nearly as important as how we act. Many in the room were not interested in communicating (or at least over-communicating) their CSR efforts. In their minds, actions speak louder than words and CSR (or whatever they call these efforts) should be first-and-foremost about how they conduct business, i.e. in a responsible, ethical, and sustainable way.

Although I don’t disagree that it is essential to be “walking the talk,” I would argue that “how” is only half of the equation. The activities our organizations choose to pursue in support of joint business and societal value is a critical element of a strategic CSR approach. Without this strategic direction, you could be involved in diverse and non-aligned CSR initiatives, even though they are conducted in a responsible way and even though they aim to ensure long-term sustainability. Read More »

Kathleen Ryan Mufson, Director, Corporate Citizenship at Pitney Bowes

(Special thanks to our guest blogger, Kathleen Ryan Mufson, Director, Corporate Citizenship & Philanthropy at Pitney Bowes, who attended the CEC’s recent CSR meeting. Coming out of the meeting, Kathleen shared the following thoughts and takeaways. This post originally appeared on the Pitney Bowes Corporate blog.)

Quick! What comes to mind when you hear the terms Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Responsibility, Sustainability, Corporate Citizenship, and, my new favorite, Corporate Social Intelligence?  Did you answer environmental stewardship? Perhaps philanthropy and volunteerism sounded right.  Governance? Diversity?  Ethics?  Maybe you thought about all of these and more.   When it comes to nomenclature, this is an area with many evolving terms, but given its dynamic role in driving value for companies and communities that’s probably a good thing.

On Tuesday, I participated in an engaging roundtable discussion on “Driving a Strategic CSR Agenda.”  The event, sponsored by the Communications Executive Council of the Corporate Executive Board was hosted by Chevron Corporation in their Washington, D.C. offices.    The other participants and I were eager to learn new approaches to aligning CSR with business strategy and objectives.  The forum did not disappoint.

The discussion was thought provoking, challenging companies to focus on strategic innovations, employee engagement and strong alignment to the business.  Other takeaways drove home the importance of structured stakeholder engagement and staying true to your company’s culture.

One thing is clear: Companies who embrace, embed and nurture this strategic business function are on the right path for competitive differentiation and success in the 21^st century business environment.

At Pitney Bowes, we’ve been leading in CSR since before the first term was coined.  We understand its value to our business, our strategy, our employees, and our relationships with customers and community partners.  More important, we continually look for ways to further advance our results and drive positive change in our communities.

For the latest on Pitney Bowes’ CSR efforts go to www.pb.com/responsibility, and feel free to share what your organization is doing to drive positive change in the community.

Note from the CEC: We will be hosting our next CSR meeting on 30 March in London. CEC members, register here!

A couple of months ago, as a part of our ongoing project around Corporate Social Responsibility, CEC launched its CSR Management Diagnostic, designed to help members identify the areas upon which they should be focusing their CSR energies.

Members were asked to assess the importance that they attached to a given activity versus how effective they were at performing that activity. For example, if cross-functional collaboration is seen as important, but the participating company isn’t very good at generating such collaboration, that would be flagged as an area of focus. We also included some benchmarking questions, allowing participants to check their operation versus their peers.

With about 30 participating organizations thus far, it seemed like a good time to pull up and examine the trends that have begun to emerge. Three areas popped off the page:

1. Executive Buy-In is the Biggest Challenge Facing CSR Teams.

Members listed exec support as the single most important component of a successful CSR program, giving it an average rating of 4.5/5. However, it also had the biggest performance gap, with participants giving themselves an average effectiveness score of 3.14/5.

2. Business Partners Don’t See CSR as a ‘Value-Add’ Activity.

Perhaps this is WHY execs aren’t bought in? Only 8% of participants believe that their CSR program is perceived to be adding a ‘high’ amount of value to business outcomes. If this is the case, then I guess it’s no surprise that execs aren’t bought in.  In many cases, they actually see CSR as costing them money.

Read More »

Since we at the CEC are in the final stages of preparing for an exciting month of CSR-related events, I couldn’t help but notice a recent New York Times headline, “For Pepsi, a Business Decision with Social Benefit.”

It describes a PepsiCo venture in a couple of Mexican states whereby the company agrees to buy farmers’ corn crops at a guaranteed price. A local NGO helps farmers obtain credit (on PepsiCo’s guarantee); buy seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides; and safely dispose of pesticide containers. The program sounds like a real win-win all around: PepsiCo secures a predictable, low-cost supply of raw materials. Farmers’ living standards rise. Society at large benefits as well: less illegal migration, greater economic output, and improved tax collection, to name a few. (You can access the article’s full text here.)

Other companies are beginning to seize similar opportunities: Danone and Philips Electronics are cited by the Times; our current work uncovers similar success stories from Nestlé, Ford, TNT, and BBVA.

So why does Gaurav Gupta, regional director for Asia at Dalberg Global Development Advisors, make a point of saying that this emerging practice is “good for business” as opposed to “corporate social responsibility?” Why should these terms stand in opposition? From our research, the best corporate social responsibility efforts focus on initiatives that benefit the business at the same time they benefit society at large.

I suspect that what’s going on is that too many initiatives branded as “corporate social responsibility” have merely been corporate giveaways, attracting criticism from shareholders and even internal executives, who see them as distracting from the company’s core purpose. They also invite cynicism: is the company doing good only to bolster its image among consumers or government officials? Read More »

What’s so damned funny about water, barley, hops and yeast?  Apparently, just about everything.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love an icy cold one as much as the next guy  — and that guy happens to be my old college roommate, Earl.  But when I analyze how the big beverage companies communicate to the world, it’s increasingly apparent that their (not-quite-said-out-loud) message is:

“If you’re a dude, and you wanna have fun — your go-to move is to drain a few racks of [insert billion-dollar beer brand name here].”

Did you watch the Super Bowl this year?  Seemed like half the commercials were for beer, and most of them were designed to appeal to a juvenile, goofball, male sense of humor. True confession: Commercials like that make me laugh.  LMAO.  And if that’s the goal, then…mission accomplished.  I love humor that’s as bawdy, sophomoric, and jejune as it comes.

Problem is:  so does my 17-year old son, and most kids like him.

And therein lies the question:  Who’s the target audience for these commercials?  The big brewing companies will tell you “they are aiming exclusively at adults aged 21+.”  And they’ll also tell you they spend hundreds of millions on their corporate responsibility campaigns.  Hey, I’m not saying they don’t.

But if you spend billions on messaging that encourages behavior that often ends up causing immeasurable human tragedy, then you justify it by spending (let’s be fair and say) one-tenth that amount on messaging that urges caution when engaging in those same behaviors — what does that make you? Read More »

When it comes to aligning business actions to CSR priorities, communicators often say they lack the resources or the authority to “force” business partners into action. Members tell us things like “We’re agents of change, but we’re not doers. Execution is down to the business.” Or “We view our role as catalysts, to help the business see the bigger picture, the hidden business opportunities.” While for some organizations this may still be more aspiration than reality, one great example of becoming a catalyst for CSR in the organization is Unilever.

Now, Unilever is a well-documented case of creating shared value (most famously through Hindustan Unilever’s project Shakti), but recently the company has taken a further step of actually branding its commitment to sustainable business through its Sustainable Living Plan. The Plan, which was launched in November 2010, sets out a blueprint for how the company will achieve its sustainability objectives. By putting it on paper, Unilever is making a public statement of what it stands for as a business and what it wants to achieve, and holding itself accountable for it. There are three cool things to take away from the Sustainable Living Plan in thinking about how to get business partners more involved in executing on your priorities:

Read More »

AXA build CSR objectives from the bottom up

Here at CEC, we often hear that business partners don’t fully buy into CSR programs. It seems that CSR teams spend a lot of time understanding stakeholder expectations, and making proposals to the business about what they should be doing, often in CSR committees, or similar environments. Understandably, CSR teams are frustrated when the business fails to seize on their ideas and actually implement them.

The smart companies are making it much easier for the business to make these objectives a reality – first by getting buy-in so they want to do it, and also by making it easy for them to do so. Last week, we saw a great approach from Ford, who partner with the business to get bottom up buy-in to initiatives before going to senior leaders, and launching a new CSR initiative. What’s really smart about their approach is that it ensures that new practices are compatible with existing processes, that the managers are bought in from the offset, and that the new item won’t be rejected.

Recently, we were also really impressed to hear of a simple yet highly effective approach from insurance giants AXA. Now, although the American automotive manufacturer and the French insurer are very different entities, there is one major common denominator between their approaches; instead of using a prescriptive, top down approach, as many companies do, both companies develop new CSR initiatives in conjunction with the business units that will implement them. Read More »

One challenge with CSR, equally important to having a clear strategy, is making sure that strategy is embedded into the business processes and workflow of the organization. As Communications executives, we face two hurdles in achieving this: 1) we don’t have intimate knowledge of the business’ day to day operations, and 2) even if we do, we can’t directly influence the business’ behavior.

With limited resources we can’t (and shouldn’t) be everywhere, so how do we make it easier for business colleagues to see how they need to do their jobs differently to become more sustainable? Communication is a key part of getting the business to implement new approaches, but in many organizations this just means communicating CSR goals without doing the extra work to understand implications on the business (and, thus running the risk of rejection at the business unit-level as they see just another thing added to an already loaded plate).

One company that takes a different approach is Ford, the American automotive manufacturer, who has achieved good results in getting the organization aligned around CSR. John Viera, Director of Sustainability at Ford, takes a bottom up approach to gaining buy-in from the business: he and his team start by reaching out to middle managers –understanding direct from the frontline what implications a CSR initiative will have on work processes and gathering informal support. This helps Ford make a stronger business case in formal conversations with senior leadership. Read More »