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From Katherine Howard and Graham Young directors of Corporate Responsibility Framework Ltd
Tomorrow’s Company director Mark Goyder has done us all a service by re-opening the debate about whether corporate responsibility is going too far down the compliance route (EP5, issue 4).
What Enron highlighted is that a company can be ticking the right boxes on CSR but the behaviour of employees at all levels can still be unacceptable to society and well out of line with its stated values.
However important it is for companies to demonstrate their social and environmental credentials through stakeholder engagement, and the adoption of social and environmental projects, trustworthy and sustainable corporate responsibility cannot be built by imposing compliance from outside a company – or by concentrating a control focus on a selected number of key performance indicators. It has to be value based and driven from inside the company by its directors, rather than by external forces. For corporate responsibility to become an embedded long term reality, companies need to determine their own values and managers need to drive them comprehensively and systematically through all corporate activity.
To suggest that conviction CSR is flawed, in effect, because we can’t get good enough leadership in companies is something of a cop-out. We should not leave CSR to the whim of directors and management, but help them to see how they can apply their own (and wider society’s) understanding of responsibility to their everyday work. This is analogous to the culture change that took place in the field of ‘quality’, when you knew that a company had got the idea when it closed the quality control department and made everybody responsible for quality.
The future for corporate responsibility is not about whether we throw out all the standards, codes and consultations, but about how they are used. In this context the present tools on offer are beginning to be found wanting by some company managers, not because they are bad at what they do but because they do not hit the ‘behaviour button’. Something else needs to be done so that company culture and behaviour throughout the business is effectively addressed. Current activity, which is largely focused on producing reports and gaining badges, has done a great job of raising the profile of CSR, but there needs to be a re-focusing now on behaviour inside the business. The current portfolio of standards and KPIs does not provide a mechanism for meeting this requirement. There is a significant gap.
What we need is an effective framework of principles and processes that gives assurance of behaviour in alignment with stated values both internally to boards and externally to stakeholders. If companies want to improve their reputation by building trust then their attention should become focused on introducing such a framework.
Some of the corporate leaders in this field are growing dissatisfied with the present tool kit, and are looking for something completely different, a shift as radical as when ‘quality control departments’ were closed. Unlike that scenario, there is at present no effective means available for embedding corporate responsibility. We need to be ready with the ‘deep vein’ solutions that make everybody responsible for corporate responsibility.
Tomorrow’s Company director Mark Goyder has done us all a service by re-opening the debate about whether corporate responsibility is going too far down the compliance route (EP5, issue 4).
What Enron highlighted is that a company can be ticking the right boxes on CSR but the behaviour of employees at all levels can still be unacceptable to society and well out of line with its stated values.
However important it is for companies to demonstrate their social and environmental credentials through stakeholder engagement, and the adoption of social and environmental projects, trustworthy and sustainable corporate responsibility cannot be built by imposing compliance from outside a company – or by concentrating a control focus on a selected number of key performance indicators. It has to be value based and driven from inside the company by its directors, rather than by external forces. For corporate responsibility to become an embedded long term reality, companies need to determine their own values and managers need to drive them comprehensively and systematically through all corporate activity.
To suggest that conviction CSR is flawed, in effect, because we can’t get good enough leadership in companies is something of a cop-out. We should not leave CSR to the whim of directors and management, but help them to see how they can apply their own (and wider society’s) understanding of responsibility to their everyday work. This is analogous to the culture change that took place in the field of ‘quality’, when you knew that a company had got the idea when it closed the quality control department and made everybody responsible for quality.
The future for corporate responsibility is not about whether we throw out all the standards, codes and consultations, but about how they are used. In this context the present tools on offer are beginning to be found wanting by some company managers, not because they are bad at what they do but because they do not hit the ‘behaviour button’. Something else needs to be done so that company culture and behaviour throughout the business is effectively addressed. Current activity, which is largely focused on producing reports and gaining badges, has done a great job of raising the profile of CSR, but there needs to be a re-focusing now on behaviour inside the business. The current portfolio of standards and KPIs does not provide a mechanism for meeting this requirement. There is a significant gap.
What we need is an effective framework of principles and processes that gives assurance of behaviour in alignment with stated values both internally to boards and externally to stakeholders. If companies want to improve their reputation by building trust then their attention should become focused on introducing such a framework.
Some of the corporate leaders in this field are growing dissatisfied with the present tool kit, and are looking for something completely different, a shift as radical as when ‘quality control departments’ were closed. Unlike that scenario, there is at present no effective means available for embedding corporate responsibility. We need to be ready with the ‘deep vein’ solutions that make everybody responsible for corporate responsibility.
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