Human resource managers are well positioned to play an instrumental role in helping their organization achieve its goals of becoming a socially and environmentally responsible firm – one which reduces its negative and enhances its positive impacts on society and the environment. Further, human resource (HR) professionals in organizations that perceive successful corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a key driver of their financial performance, can be influential in realizing on that objective.
While there is considerable guidance to firms who wish to be the best place to work and for firms who seek to manage their employee relationships in a socially responsible way, there is a dearth of information for the HR manager who sees the importance of embedding their firm’s CSR values throughout the organization, who wish to assist the executive team in integrating CSR into the company’s DNA. And as high profile corporate failures such as Enron make all too clear, organizations that pay lip-service to
CSR while neglecting to foster a CSR culture run the risk of damaging their corporate reputation if not their demise. Indeed, HR’s mandate to communicate and implement ideas, policies, and cultural and behavioural change in organizations makes it central to fulfilling an organization’s objectives to “integrate CSR in all that we do.” That said, it is important to understand that employee engagement is not simply the mandate of HR.
Indeed people leadership rests with all departmental managers. HR can facilitate the development of processes and systems; however, employee engagement is ultimately a shared responsibility. The more the HR practitioner can understand their leverage with respect to CSR, the greater their ability to pass these insights along to their business partners towards the organization’s objectives in integrating CSR