Quanta Corporate Citizenship The dangers of lazy lip service 20/04/2010
We all know at least one person who says they go to the gym. They are the ones that are healthy, active and responsible about looking after their health. They are usually the ones that make others a little bit jealous. The reality for a lot of gym members, though, is they talk a lot about going to the gym, but just as the time comes to pull on their trainers an episode of the latest TV drama comes on that cannot be missed, or a long lost friend is in town for one day, or they need to catch up on emails, or they’re worried about that old injury returning, or they are just too tired.
Most of us can probably recognise a few excuses in there ourselves, but as wannabe fitness people we pay lip service to ‘going to the gym tonight’, time and time again, until one day a friend makes a joke about us not knowing what the inside of a gym looks like. The ridicule you can probably live with, after all its true, but we lose two significant types of advantage once our cover is broken.
The first is the perceived advantage. When you look after your health, and balance seeing friends and doing well at work, you’re the person who has it all. You’re the rounded individual who can handle anything thrown at them. You’re not lazy, distracted or complacent to the important things: you take the lead, the one in charge. You’re interesting, multi-faceted, and this is an attractive quality to have. After all, ‘hobbies and other activities” is the section we always have to add to our CV’s for fear of being just a standard human being.
The second is the real advantage. When you actually get to the gym you improve your cardiovascular fitness, you decrease the risk of heart attacks and strokes, keep your weight to an optimum level and reduce the risk of diabetes and increase your mobility in the later stages of your life. You really are the person who is set to have it all.
Both of these advantages are the ones you risk when you leave yourself vulnerable to whistle blowers of your inactivity. Our lazy, but ‘want to be part of the cool group’ approach increases the stakes we have to lose. And so it is with CSR. When companies fall victim of great criticism about the inactivity of their CSR commitments, not only do they undermine the perceived advantages of their CSR programmes – good PR and reputation –, but their inactivity means a longer term damage to their business, to the health of their company not 5 years down the line but 50 years down the line. With global online and off line communications becoming more and more advanced, it takes just minutes to hear reports of shareholders opposing environmentally harmful activity or of supply chains being riddled with human rights abuses.
CSR is not easy work. It requires commitment and hard effort, and businesses need to learn how to protect the perceived and real advantages of their efforts with solid strategies. Strategy is the foundation stone, the key to knowing where to start and what effort to put in. It is the coaching your gym instructor gives you after you’ve discussed your goals that makes the most of your time, gives you the best rewards for your efforts, and makes you keep coming back for more.
- Kim
Most of us can probably recognise a few excuses in there ourselves, but as wannabe fitness people we pay lip service to ‘going to the gym tonight’, time and time again, until one day a friend makes a joke about us not knowing what the inside of a gym looks like. The ridicule you can probably live with, after all its true, but we lose two significant types of advantage once our cover is broken.
The first is the perceived advantage. When you look after your health, and balance seeing friends and doing well at work, you’re the person who has it all. You’re the rounded individual who can handle anything thrown at them. You’re not lazy, distracted or complacent to the important things: you take the lead, the one in charge. You’re interesting, multi-faceted, and this is an attractive quality to have. After all, ‘hobbies and other activities” is the section we always have to add to our CV’s for fear of being just a standard human being.
The second is the real advantage. When you actually get to the gym you improve your cardiovascular fitness, you decrease the risk of heart attacks and strokes, keep your weight to an optimum level and reduce the risk of diabetes and increase your mobility in the later stages of your life. You really are the person who is set to have it all.
Both of these advantages are the ones you risk when you leave yourself vulnerable to whistle blowers of your inactivity. Our lazy, but ‘want to be part of the cool group’ approach increases the stakes we have to lose. And so it is with CSR. When companies fall victim of great criticism about the inactivity of their CSR commitments, not only do they undermine the perceived advantages of their CSR programmes – good PR and reputation –, but their inactivity means a longer term damage to their business, to the health of their company not 5 years down the line but 50 years down the line. With global online and off line communications becoming more and more advanced, it takes just minutes to hear reports of shareholders opposing environmentally harmful activity or of supply chains being riddled with human rights abuses.
CSR is not easy work. It requires commitment and hard effort, and businesses need to learn how to protect the perceived and real advantages of their efforts with solid strategies. Strategy is the foundation stone, the key to knowing where to start and what effort to put in. It is the coaching your gym instructor gives you after you’ve discussed your goals that makes the most of your time, gives you the best rewards for your efforts, and makes you keep coming back for more.
- Kim
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Corporate social responsibility is this season’s fashionable word, probably second only to sustainability. And as it happens to every buzzword, there is a substantial amount of noise mixed up with reality. When it comes to CSR investment, there are things we know will work and things we know won't work. But, the vast majority are still things we suspect work and things we wish worked because it makes us feel good. But, frankly, this is just wishful thinking and a sure fire recipe for corporate disappointment.
There is still very limited academic research around CSR that is really relevant for companies. There are a lot of reviews of reviews, a lot of good-looking academic frameworks, but when it comes to really hard evidence, very few pieces of work – such as the one by Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim, we’ve discussed here not long ago – pass the tests of reliability and relevance.
And then there is the dangerous territory: things we want to believe, but are not necessarily true, let alone proven. We’ve recently spoken in this same space about how a survey found out that, contrary to our long held belief, people who invest on green products do not act more socially responsibly. Actually, they tend to act less socially responsibly once they’ve made that green commitment. And the more we research this area, the more we will find evidences against our wishful thinking.
And, finally, there are the things that we suspect based on observations, but where there is still no academic research to prove it.
In this group of things we suspect but can’t prove, probably the most relevant is that great CSR does not create great culture. This is because the concept of great culture is a subjective one . Suffice to see how the recent financial crisis left many company corpses along the road, many of whom used to be regarded as bastions of great cultures.
If anything, our anecdotal evidence points in the opposite direction: great cultures (or, to be specific, great leadership cultures) create great CSR. But, frankly, there is no scientific evidence to prove it. What we know is based on our experience, but that does not make it scientifically proven.
And this is also connected to the biggest problem middle managers – especially CSR managers – have in advocating CSR commitments within their companies: there is no proof that those commitments will work, and those very limited commitments that are scientifically proven to work (or not) are things that everybody else is already doing (and often have already been forced on them in form of laws and regulations by national governments). So, in one hand they have line managers demanding innovative approaches and reassurance that their investments will generated the expected results, but they can’t give that reassurance without first committing to invest on them. On the other hand, they have a very limited portfolio of potential commitments that they know will work because academic research has proven that they work; but the only reason why academics have been able to prove they work is because there is a wide enough pool of evidence constituted by the investments done by thousands of companies, and, in that case, the innovation element is no longer there: the organisation, at best, will play a me-too strategy.
And that is why great leadership cultures generate great CSR investments: because they are open to the risk involved in trying to innovate, and they know the risks are worth taking because they understand their own strategic objectives, the potential rewards and the underlying challenges.
- Gus
There is still very limited academic research around CSR that is really relevant for companies. There are a lot of reviews of reviews, a lot of good-looking academic frameworks, but when it comes to really hard evidence, very few pieces of work – such as the one by Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim, we’ve discussed here not long ago – pass the tests of reliability and relevance.
And then there is the dangerous territory: things we want to believe, but are not necessarily true, let alone proven. We’ve recently spoken in this same space about how a survey found out that, contrary to our long held belief, people who invest on green products do not act more socially responsibly. Actually, they tend to act less socially responsibly once they’ve made that green commitment. And the more we research this area, the more we will find evidences against our wishful thinking.
And, finally, there are the things that we suspect based on observations, but where there is still no academic research to prove it.
In this group of things we suspect but can’t prove, probably the most relevant is that great CSR does not create great culture. This is because the concept of great culture is a subjective one . Suffice to see how the recent financial crisis left many company corpses along the road, many of whom used to be regarded as bastions of great cultures.
If anything, our anecdotal evidence points in the opposite direction: great cultures (or, to be specific, great leadership cultures) create great CSR. But, frankly, there is no scientific evidence to prove it. What we know is based on our experience, but that does not make it scientifically proven.
And this is also connected to the biggest problem middle managers – especially CSR managers – have in advocating CSR commitments within their companies: there is no proof that those commitments will work, and those very limited commitments that are scientifically proven to work (or not) are things that everybody else is already doing (and often have already been forced on them in form of laws and regulations by national governments). So, in one hand they have line managers demanding innovative approaches and reassurance that their investments will generated the expected results, but they can’t give that reassurance without first committing to invest on them. On the other hand, they have a very limited portfolio of potential commitments that they know will work because academic research has proven that they work; but the only reason why academics have been able to prove they work is because there is a wide enough pool of evidence constituted by the investments done by thousands of companies, and, in that case, the innovation element is no longer there: the organisation, at best, will play a me-too strategy.
And that is why great leadership cultures generate great CSR investments: because they are open to the risk involved in trying to innovate, and they know the risks are worth taking because they understand their own strategic objectives, the potential rewards and the underlying challenges.
- Gus
