HR has ‘critical’ role in realising business value of CSR

HR professionals have a huge opportunity to boost the bottom line by driving corporate social responsibility (CSR), employers at the CIPD CSR conference heard yesterday.

Jonathon Porritt, director of non-profit organisation Forum for the Future, highlighted Marks and Spencer’s Plan A sustainability programme as a good example of the value that CSR can add.

The retailer launched this initiative five years ago and it has already made a large contribution to the bottom line, Porritt said.

“M&S has said that the business case for Plan A is absolutely clear. In 2010 they announced that the plan had positively contributed £50million to profits, and in 2011 the figure is closer to £75m.”

Don’t dismiss CSR as costly green wash, he said, and urged employers to view it as investment in sustainable growth.

Cultural change and employee engagement have been key to the plan’s success with group HR director Tanith Dodge and Richard Gillies, director of Plan A, CSR and sustainable business, working closely on it.

HR owns the culture and people management functions that influence change and that is why it is so critical that it is involved in CSR strategy, Porritt said.

M&S has “mainstreamed” CSR policy and engaged its workforce with Plan A champions and policy based awards. It has been so successful that the ethos has entered employee parlance, so a comment that can be heard around the water cooler is: “... that’s not very Plan A is it?” Porritt said.

The link between Plan A targets and senior executives was strengthened last year when chief executive Marc directly linked executive remuneration to CSR targets. 

Another firm to “mainstream” its CSR focus is Aviva. Marie Sigsworth, Aviva’s group CR director, told PM: “The Aviva Investor business had a small social responsibility team. Now those funds are shifting into our global responsibility investment team. So rather than having one fund, they are shifting to mainstream ESG (environmental, social and governance) considerations. 

"We’re taking it from niche to mainstream by embedding it in the main business. It will move from being the focus of 26 people to having 36,100 employees focus on it.”

Sue Ellis, BT CSR programme director, urged delegates not to wait for top level sign off or big budgets to get started on CSR programmes to engage staff and boost performance.

She said that when BT had started talking about CSR and cultural change, some people thought investing in it was “indulgent”.

She said that cultural change had been critical to getting staff buy in at BT. To kick start this change the firm sent top executives on sustainable leadership development training, run by Henley Business School, to challenge how they thought about CSR. “By changing leadership, you can get this CR stuff embedded better,” she said.

They also asked staff what could be done in individual offices to be more sustainable. 

“Just do something, be a Trojan mouse” she said, “because if you wait you will do nothing.”