I’m sitting in an open space area at Hub King’s Cross in London reflecting on Ethical Corp’s Responsible Business Summit which ended last night. How can I sum-up two packed days of interactions between corporate responsibility practitioners? Here’s my early assessment of key trends in the industry.
Top 2011 CSR trends:
- CSR practitioners rejoice! Studies from half a dozen large consultancy firms in the last year indicate a continued growing importance of Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability.
- Full life cycle analysis to assess the environmental impact of products is becoming widespread.
- The “social” aspect of CSR is often neglected at the expense of the “environmental” agenda. Yet, studies are showing that social initiatives contribute more to a positive brand image than greening enterprises (Goodbrand).
- China will be the place to experiment better ways to be sustainable over the next few years: they are building several new “sustainable cities” from scratch. Companies like TNT are hoping to test novel ideas there first and then, bring them back to the western world.
- Corporations will continue to judge CSR investments based on “good business practices”- meaning: it has to generate a positive financial return.
- Sustainability is becoming more and more integral to business. CSR reporting is being done within the annual report (instead of a separate report) to show full integration with corporate strategy.
- Building trust is a chief driver of CSR.
- CR reporting is becoming more sophisticated: balance must be achieved between comprehensiveness and readability.
- Leading companies are taking the responsibility for helping consumers reduce utilization of resources (water, pollutants, energy…).
- Companies are increasingly engaging with stakeholders for all aspects of their operations: CSR reporting, new product design, social impact initiatives, investment decisions, foreign plant working conditions…
- Technology will play an important role in making the world more sustainable. (this is a bonus trend!)
Implications for leaders: These trends will require new skills from leaders. They must have a longer time horizon, think more broadly in terms of value creation (read Porter on Creating Shared Value), learn to work more collaboratively and communicate with more transparency.
I invite other participants at the summit to offer additional comments or perspectives.
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Thanks for this nice summary exploring most aspects of CSR. I have a question facing CSR implementation in SME’s. All’s quite fine for large corporations which definitely must show the way and also have the means and resources to implement CSR at their pace. But what about SME’s? Do you know of any organisation, network or communities which help them out with target fixing, action planning and sorting out the extra-financial reporting? Any international or national initiative you know of? Thanks!
Bonjour Edith, merci pour ton commentaire.
You are absolutely right, these types of cenference target large corporations who can afford dedicated CSR staff and there are not very many venues to find resources for SMEs. That being said, I have found a wonderful community on Twitter. Tweeters like @davidcoethica, @CJ_Esposito, @VaultCSR, @susanmcp1 and many others are very active and have blogs with tons of information. I found them generally very happy to answer questions.
At an international level there is a small network of business people I belong to who promote ethics in business, CSR, equal partnership of women and men in the workplace… It is called EBBF. You can find them at http://www.ebbf.org . They have local chapters in most European countries and in America. They have published many interesting small publications like : Ethics and entrepreneurship, an oxymoron?; Socially responsible enterprise restructuring etc.
Finally, there are many independent consultants, like myself who are alway happy to be of help!
Bon succès!