CSR - boardroom opportunity or business headache?
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) should be much more than just a specific strategy adopted to impress stakeholders or briefly implemented before moving on to the next fad. Rob Peddle and Ian Rosam stress that CSR is a much more fundamental way of giving direction and managing the whole organization, and works best within an ISO 9000-based framework
CSR has been hailed as the next big thing to hit all organizations, whatever their size or sector. However, the problem with CSR is that many people see it as being primarily focused on either the environment, the organization’s social impact or good communication, whereas the reality is that it is all of these topics - and much more.
What is CSR?
CSR is about the way an organization is managed – strategically and operationally. It’s about how it balances the economic, environmental and social impacts it has on the world around it. Even if it had unlimited resources, no organization can be perfect in all three of these areas all of the time. CSR, therefore, has to become a way of life that allows the organization to react in the most effective and efficient way possible to a dynamic, constantly evolving world. CSR should be a philosophy: a belief system and an approach that informs and drives the organization forward.
Isn’t this just about effective management of the organizations? This includes:
- understanding and prioritizing the requirements of its stakeholders
- defining the resources and objectives into a business plan that can actually be delivered
- measuring how well this has been achieved
- making changes to manage risks more successfully
Yes. Confusion is caused as soon as any one individual interest group hijacks the CSR agenda, when the balance is lost together with any understanding of what it is all about.
How to go about it
There is no single set of deliverables that every organization must achieve in order to work successfully with CSR. Every organization operates under its own unique set of stakeholder pressures and the leaders of the organization need to make up their own mind about how much, or little, they will address these pressures - what business risks will it take? - and how it will manage its stakeholders’ perceptions about what it is doing.
The only things that organizations must do are those they are legally required to, and even then many choose to ‘sail close to the wind’ on some of these (CSR risk management). CSR cannot, therefore, be about absolute requirements. It can only be about the way an organization interacts with its stakeholders and then delivers what has been agreed with them. Laws and pseudo-legal frameworks are the only places where an absolute requirement can be stated and to reasonably expect the majority to follow. CSR, by its very nature, is not one of these as no organization will want, or need, to deliver exactly what another does.
How does this compare with a QMS?
So how can two concepts such as CSR and quality management systems (QMSs) ever be considered identical? Let us consider QMSs in more detail.
Most people consider a QMS as a way of ensuring the consistent delivery of products and services to customers, matching their needs and hopefully delighting them. ISO 9001 made a great jump forward by providing a mechanism by which this can best be achieved in any organization and defines this within its clauses.
Note here that these are principles to be applied, not clauses to be blindly followed. The downfall of far too many QMSs has been blindly creating a system that followed the clauses and not one that applied the principles. Is this really how the people who created the standard wanted it to be applied? Or is it just because this is easier to audit both internally and externally?
Applying ISO 9001 principles
So what happens if the principles are applied thoughtfully? First, it becomes obvious that the QMS cannot operate in a vacuum. It is 100 per cent dependant on that which is going on elsewhere in the organization and is a living system covering both hard and soft management issues. If each of these areas is treated independently there will be a proliferation of disparate ‘systems’, each fighting for resource and recognition. Something that happens in one will affect what happens in the other – it will be like trying to manage a hostile crowd.
Quality, in this context, is impossible to manage without taking management action in the other systems that affect it. Quality is best achieved through creating a single management system in which the management of all of these supposed individual systems can be balanced.
The principles of ISO 9000 are sound for any organization. It is the cross-functional processes that actually deliver performance – and that is what your stakeholders, including your customers, will judge you on. If you build your QMS first and foremost as a business management system then customers, as one of your key stakeholder groups, will have their needs balanced against all others, and all standards, models and frameworks that they require will be incorporated – this is the true definition of CSR and means a different balance for every organisation.
About the authors
Rob Peddle is an experienced business manager, change agent and facilitator, and Ian Rosam is a project leader, coach, mentor and facilitator. They are directors of The HPO Group. The HPO Group provides online assessment of business processes, systems, standards, competence and other frameworks. These are enhanced by the facilitation of effective process-based systems and management system ‘portals of the future’. For more information e: enquiries@the-hpo.com
The HPO was highly involved in the creation of a ‘Real World’ CSR Implementation Framework and associated Guide, which were published by BSI Publications at the end of 2004. A new wave of services has also been developed in partnership with UL International (UK), a global player in product certification and system registration.
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