July is the traditional CSR awards month. As well as the Business in the Community (BITC) awards, it does seem that for almost every group a company works with, whether it’s a community group, an environmental charity or a government department, July is the month they hold awards, receptions and events.
The heroic will try to attend all of them, the smarter will capitalise on the opportunity to engage with other functions internally and encourage them to attend. The opportunity to influence internal stakeholders through including them in these events should not be underestimated.
A recent fundraising dinner jointly organised by the Ministry of Defence and KPMG saw three out of the four MOD ministers in attendance as well as many senior KPMG attendees– not just for the reception but for the whole evening. This enabled them to make a tangible demonstration of their commitment to the issue at hand, in this case, homelessness.
A couple of years ago it may have been that we would have canvassed for our human resources colleagues to attend such events. Nowadays, however it is far more likely to be heads of business areas and employees from across the business who support them. It would now be very unlikely for any CSR event in which we participate, not to have a direct link back to part of the business and it is through these links that we encourage people to attend.
The integration of CSR is very much on the business agenda, with more and more companies talking about how and what they will integrate, within their own enterprise. There are a number of initiatives being undertaken in Brussels at EU level and more locally here in the UK. The recent Marketplace event organised by CSR Europe was a very effective way of experiencing a huge diversity of CSR partnerships, many of which were quasi-commercial initiatives. If my foreign language skills had been better, I would have understood a lot more about the challenges of locating a call centre operation within a prison and using the inmates to staff that enterprise!
While the full integration of CSR in to the business model is yet to be extensively developed, a recent meeting of CSR practitioners concluded that we might be at the ‘tipping point’ when CSR really does go mainstream. If it’s easier, starting this process via the procurement function, a highly professionalised body, is not a bad thing. Procurement professionals have antennae attuned to client demands as well as the business constraints. If we have reached a tipping point, then we will start to see a changing emphasis in procurement questionnaires, from CSR being mentioned fairly briefly, to a much more developed probing into policies and practises.
Over the last few months the GRI G3 sustainable reporting guidelines have been the subject of a huge amount of public consultation and the launch event is now less than three months away. The website has a summary of where the consultation responses have come from and also the areas where there has been most dialogue. Now that we are into the second half of the year it is probably too late for those with a reporting period finishing December 31 change tack, but is the right time to be thinking about revisions to any reporting process for 2007.
With World Environment Day out of the way it might have been that pressure on the issue of environmental responsibility would subside. However the continuing presence of climate change in the national press presents an opportunity to go back to the company car scheme. You don’t have to be an environmental expert, we all understand the issues and there are plenty of websites that can tell you the greenest and the meanest vehicles, in terms of their environmental pollution characteristics. Of course you don’t have to stop there, the top ten tips for green driving all bring with them reduced costs; the current price of crude oil alone is a reason for all staff to take the environmental impact of their driving seriously.
MIke Kelly is head of CSR at KPMG LLP (UK). He writes The Practitioner column every month, previewing key upcoming events.
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