Posts Tagged ‘CSR’

The new CSR Index from Boston College and Reputation Institute is out.  Katherine Smith, executive director of the Carroll School of Management Center for Corporate Citizenship at Boston College, remarked, ”Reputation is now widely accepted as a valuable intangible asset for firms, and as such it is an aspect of business that is earning increasing interest and attention from the C-suite and board. It is an indicator of how strongly connected consumers are to a brand. The effectiveness of a company’s reputation management will influence the bottom line — in either a positive or negative manner.” A total of 285 companies were measured among the general public for their best corporate citizenship reputations in the U.S.

Interestingly, there was a decline in ratings (2011′s top rating of 80.59 vs. 82.67 in 2010) speaks to the higher expectations placed on companies and greater skepticism about business in general. The continuing scandals, CEO ousters, board malfeasance, strategic missteps, etc. is now placing an equally intense spotlight on integrity and governance issues as it does on corporate social responsbility.  Additionally, I have been asked more than once whether CSR is fading in importance as the economy sours and the world seems to be in one big funk.  My answer is that it is probably more important than ever that companies step in to make a difference and commit to creating a better world. I think that citizenship is tablestakes today.

Came across an interesting statement about CEOs this morning. It was in a Justmeans  blog post about how CSR needs to get more humanized, meaning making a stronger link between the CSR director or manager with a company’s CSR initiatives and thereby giving it a face. The author Akhila Vijayaraghavan wrote:

This year will see the beginning of a shift from CSR itself to the CSR practitioner. Just like brand image is beginning to collate itself with CEO image, so will CSR with the CSR practitioner/manager. I believe this could be an important trend because putting a ‘face’ on CSR makes it not so ‘corporate’. CSR practitioners deal with far-reaching environmental, social and ethical issues on a daily basis that are profoundly human. Taking the corporate out of CSR will bring to the spotlight of what the people in businesses are really capable of . This is a good thing not just for CSR but also CSR practitioners.

As a long-time CEO reputation watcher and if I understand what she meant in her post (people often speak about brand and corporate reputation/image in the same breath), brands — not just corporations — will increasingly be linked with CEOs. For many years, the research I did found that nearly one half of a company’s reputation was tied to that of its CEO. However, the reputation of the brand was not as tightly correlated until the Internet came along and changed the game. Now that anyone anywhere can find out the parent company of a brand and also who its CEO is, that is most probably changing. And I expect it will change quickly.

  Accenture just completed an impressive research study among global CEOs and other influentials around the world for the UN Global Compact Leaders Summit in 2010.  They say that it is the largest survey ever among CEOs on sustainability. Some of the key findings are worth thinking about as sustainability defines the corporate reputation landscape in a few short years to come:

1. Brand/trust/reputation is the strongest reason why CEOs say they are taking action on sustainability (72% say so). The next best reason lags fairly far behind at 44% –  potential for revenue growth and cost reduction. Reputation seems to be behind the motivation for many CEO and corporate actions these days.

2. CEOs recognize that the consumer is the most influential stakeholder on the issues of sustainability in the years ahead — 58% of CEOs say so and it is a perception that ranks even higher than employees (45%).  They believe that consumers are King despite the mixed evidence on whether consumers are demanding products that are sustainability-true (a word I just made up).

3. Collaboration is critical to the sustainability movement.  Here I have to agree since I am seeing a greater focus among clients on partnerships and coalitions in all areas, including CSR. As Accenture writes, “…global challenges are too broad and too complex to go it alone.” Multi-stakeholder partnerships are the new trend in corporate reputation building.

4. One of the more significant findings was that 81% of CEOs say that sustainability is now embedded into the strategy and operations of their companies — a big jump from 50 percent three years ago.  New to me was that sustainability is being built into executive compensation packages today.

5. CEOs believe that by 2015, sustainability will be fully integrated into company footprints. A large 80% believe that by then, this dynamic will be commonplace. That is not far away and it is about time. I was telling someone who interviewed me recently that although 2015 feels as if it is upon us, the truth is that this has been a long way coming. I recall back in 1990 when I first learned more about the Fortune Most Admired Companies survey how surprised I was that environmental/social responsibility was so low on the totem pole of reputation drivers. I thought there had to be a mistake. But that is what it was then. All in all, it has been a long progression to get to 2015.

   Anglo Platinum produced its first fully integrated single volume annual report this year.  Here is the link. A friend of mine sent me this information because of my interest in “integrated reporting” where financial and non-financial information are unified into One Report. That is also the name of Harvard professor Robert Eccles new book, One Report, who is a leader in this area.  The discussion below was on an integrated reporting discussion site on LinkedIn that I could not access but that just might be me!  Perhaps I have to be invited to the discussion group.  I did try. The person to contact for more information is Stephen Bullock, Sustainable Development Manager at Anglo Platinum who is on LinkedIn.

I found the reasons behind Anglo Platinum’s integrated reporting very insightful and interesting, particularly this: ”Firstly we wanted to demonstrate how CSR has been integrated into how the business is operated and run and this was difficult to do by producing a separate SD report. It created the perception that SD/CSR was an after thought i.e. how we make our profits is different to how we spend them.”  The point of integratred reporting is well made in those two sentences.  See the input from Anglo Platinum below which appeared in the discussion area.

“This was a change from the two previous volumes with volume 1 in the past being the business report and volume 2 the sustainable development report. What were the drivers for integration? There were a few drivers that led us at Anglo Platinum to produce an integrated report. Firstly we wanted to demonstrate how CSR has been integrated into how the business is operated and run and this was difficult to do by producing a separate SD report. It created the perception that SD/CSR was an after thought i.e. how we make our profits is different to how we spend them. Secondly the new King Code on Corporate Governance in South Africa is encouraging integrated reporting; although the King Code does clearly state that integrated reporting does not mean one report. Thirdly there was the cost element. By producing one report we greatly reduced printing and posting costs associated with the distribution of our annual report to shareholders. What were the challenges? To the best of our knowledge no other resources company had at the time completed an integrated report and we were chartering new ground. We had to rely on examples and experience of integrated reporting from outside of the resources sector. Another big challenge we faced was to be able to ensure that our stakeholders who were used to getting certain information new exactly where to find it in the integrated report. This was overcome by producing an explanation behind our integrated report and a summary reference on page 1 to where stakeholders could find what information. In addition we did produce our “normal” SD report that is available in HTML and pdf format on the company’s website for those stakeholders who simply want to scrutinize the CSR information. Initially we had hoped to create one set of financial and non-financial statements in the same section of the report. However due to differences in financial and CSR assurance we were unable to do this satisfactorily and took the decision to include all SD/CSR related data in the company statistics section of the report. We will be working with our auditing firms this year to overcome this problem for 2010 and hopefully achieve true integration in 2010.”

Two weeks ago I went to the Harvard Club in Cambridge to accept an award on behalf of Weber Shandwick for the best corporate responsibility advisory firm in CR magazine’s ranking of our category. No doubt about it…it was an honor. CR rated public relations agencies and advertising/marketing firms and we topped the list. The meeting in Cambridge was to honor CR’s 100 Best Corporate Citizens and to gather people together to discuss corproate responsibility. This was before the Horizon oil spill which would have undoubtedly dominated the discussion. The meeting was terrific by the way.

What surprised me the most was that one of the issues that was given out in addition to the issue devoted to 100 Best Corporate Citizens was CR‘s Black List.

This made me wonder whether there will be a bumper crop of Black Lists in the next few years. Should we brace ourselves for Black Lists of the worst companies to work for, least ethical companies, worst companies for working mothers, worst MBA programs, most terrible IT companies to apply for, meanest CEOs, etc. Actually there have been many Worst CEO lists — according to Google there are nearly 900,000 hits for Worst CEOs.  No surprise. But the Black List sounded deadly to me and I cracked open the issue to learn why a publication would go this far. Below is what CR’s magazine’s editor Jay Whitehead had to say about why they published the list. He makes some good points (transparency builds credibility) and I was glad to see why they did not take this List so lightly. As noted, many of the companies were on the list because they did not disclose information on the factors that go into CR’s ranking. We will see what next year brings in terms of Black Lists but I can tell you one thing….Worst CEO lists will be here for eternity. As I always say (and I am sure someone else said it before me)….Just as CEOs get all the credit when things go right, they get all the blame when things go wrong.

“We have a confession. What we have not told you is that every year after we publish the “100 Best Corporate Citizens List,” someone reminds us that we also have an obligation to publish the bottom of the list. Up until now, we’ve ignored that reminder. But we cannot ignore it any more. The “Black List” is the result of recurring demands to see which companies are the most opaque among the Russell 1000.

In publishing the “Black List,” we do not take our responsibility lightly. Companies on the “Black List” represent the least-transparent companies in the Russell 1000, which is a tough place to be in the era of corporate responsibility and its ever-intensifying drive for transparency. We expect the companies on the “Black List” will be unhappy with us.  We offer them one piece of solace. All a “Black List” company has to do is make a few CR-related data points about itself publicly available. Report a couple data points to the Carbon Disclosure Project. Put your employee benefits policies online. Publish some human rights information. Get a formal climate change policy, and put it online. Some of the actions required are the public company hygiene equivalent of washing your hands after visiting the rest room. Yet all the “Black List” companies have made the decision to skip that basic step. 

While being a “100 Best Corporate Citizens List” company is a major accomplishment requiring considerable commitment and cost, indulging in just enough transparency to get your company out of the cellar is not that hard, nor that expensive. And one thing’s for certain: it’s less embarrassing than being on the “Black List.”

 The “Black List” methodology is exactly the same as what we use for the “100 Best Corporate Citizens List.” Our population of companies is still the Russell 1000. We used the same 349 data points in 7 categories. We used the same data provider, IW Financial. We contacted each of the companies by email to request that they provide any data they have to help us correct their files. We got no replies from the 30 companies that appear on the “Black List.”

 Where the “Black List” differs from the “Best” list is in the paucity of data. Where “100 Best” companies disclose hundreds of data points in Environment, Climate Change, Human Rights, Employee Relations, Finance, Governance and Philanthropy, “Black List” companies have disclosed virtually zero. In fact, all 30 of this year’s “Black List” companies tie for dead last in every category—with the exception of three-year total return, which varied a bit as you see on the Black List above. And the irony is that “Black List” companies significantly under-performed both the S&P 500 and the “100 Best Corporate Citizens List” companies in three-year total return.”

  The reputation of business leaders continues to fall. We have seen study after study stating that confidence in CEOs is at an all-time low.  A Booz & Company survey (Recession Response: Why Companies are Making the Wrong Moves) from December 2008 among senior managers learned that 40% are unsure that their leaders have a credible plan to deal with the economic crisis. And even more—46%, are uncertain that their leaders can carry out the plan even if they believed in the plan’s foundation.

What surprised me was the perceived slowing of “green” efforts.  Four out of 10 report that “green” and CSR efforts will “significantly” diminish due to the economic downturn. The industries most expected to experience this slow down are transportation and energy. Booz & Co. suggests the following antidotes to this crisis in confidence:

• Get a clear perspective on your competitive set and your position in it
• Put together a plan that is reasonable considering that time and resources are limited. Choose a plan that can make a difference quickly
• Communicate and execute. Earn your stakeholders confidence by communication and getting things done.

Reputations are tightly linked with good communications. How else to get everyone in lockstep in difficult times and especially as workers are distracted by financial concerns and layoffs.