Improving your company’s brand perception has always been a critical marketing goal, as your public image not only affects how customers and investors engage with your company, but also how effectively your company is able to hire and retain employees.
Both of these factors can greatly impact your company’s bottom line, so it’s important that marketing teams prioritize maintaining and improving brand perception across multiple channels.
Increasingly, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a critical factor when it comes to a company’s public perception.
In this article, we’ll outline the basic tenets of corporate social responsibility along with the top reasons that CSR matters for businesses of all sizes. We’ve also gathered information on five companies that have been recognized for their outstanding corporate social responsibility, along with tips to help you emulate their efforts in your own business practices.
What is corporate social responsibility?
Corporate social responsibility is the concept that businesses have an obligation to protect and improve the community (both local and global) that they operate in.
It may be hard to think about large corporations as being genuinely interested in taking actions or initiating policies that aren’t strictly designed to directly impact shareholder profitability. But corporate social responsibility approaches profitability from a different perspective, that of the corporate stakeholder.
In many CSR programs, businesses acknowledge their responsibility to the employees, customers, and communities in which they operate, and align themselves with programs and activities that prioritize that responsibility.
As consumers have become more socially aware, CSR has become more important for public-facing companies. Under the increased scrutiny, business owners have necessarily shown more willingness to pivot on their business models to reassess and prioritize CSR programs.
Examples of corporate social responsibility in practice
While CSR programs are as diverse as the companies that implement them, there are generally four categories in which companies focus their corporate social responsibility efforts.
Philanthropy
Perhaps the lowest hanging fruit for businesses, philanthropic programs are a readily-available avenue for brands to have an immediate social impact on their communities.
Philanthropy often comes in the form of donations to existing local charities and causes—both as direct donations and in the form of matching the efforts of employee fundraising efforts; the formation of trusts, foundations, or new charities; and other programs designed to improve the quality of life of people outside of the corporation’s four walls.
Economic
Economic corporate responsibility comes from leadership making more informed and responsible business decisions that aren’t driven purely by costs or profitability. These economic decisions are built around business owners seeing their organizations as active and involved corporate citizens. Because these efforts often deal with how the business invests its resources, they can often overlap with other types of corporate social responsibility.
For example, the organization might decide to shift profits towards funding local education programs or donating to charities in the communities where they operate. Economic efforts can also involve the company’s investments and operational practices, such as investing in technologies and practices that position the company to combat climate change and have a more positive environmental impact.
Ethical and Human Rights
When it comes to social responsibility for corporate entities, it’s not always about financial expenditures. Corporate social responsibility can also be accomplished through ethical business practices focused on effecting social change.
A business showing that it treats all stakeholders fairly and that it conducts its business according to fair trade standards signals to employees and consumers alike that it values their well-being.
This can be especially powerful when communicated and demonstrated across social media platforms, as it becomes sharable content that brands can leverage to increase visibility and brand perception.
In addition to internal practices, brands can use these same channels to initiate social campaigns to drive awareness of and raise money to battle child labor, discriminatory business practices, or any of the myriad human rights causes, social initiatives, and injustices that exist in the world.
Environmental
The environmental approach requires a brand to prioritize sustainable practices across general operational standards and business practices that take the impact of their carbon footprint into account throughout production and distribution.
It’s important to point out, however, that many businesses rely on financial means to offset their impact on the environment and posture as acting responsibly. These “environmental credits” are gained when a business puts money towards programs focused on sustainability, such as planting trees or building houses or offices that are environmentally friendly, in order to offset their own environmentally harmful business practices.
Why is it important to be socially responsible as a business?
Being perceived as socially responsible provides corporations and small businesses alike with a number of advantages in the modern economy, given what consumers and employees have come to expect from the businesses they work with.
Social responsibility programs impact hiring
With millennials gradually overtaking other workforce demographics, it should not be surprising that jobseekers are increasingly interested in a company’s social responsibility practices, as this has characterized the cohort since they entered the job market.
Data reported by the Impact Marketing Club, gathered from several studies, reveals that more than two-thirds of jobseekers would prefer to work for a socially-inclined company. That sentiment is even stronger across Gen Z, with 67% of young jobseekers unwilling to even take a position with a company that has poor CSR practices.
CSR programs improve employee retention
A joint study showed that turnover can be reduced by as much as 50% through meaningful and purposeful CSR efforts. This likely reflects that when employees feel that a company is more aligned with their personal values and beliefs, they are inspired to remain and continue advocating for that organization’s mission.
Productivity and profitability are greatly impacted by strong CSR programs
Employees who feel that their values are shared by their organization are also much more likely to be engaged and involved, support growth initiatives, and work toward the business goals set out by leadership.
The increased productivity–combined with reduced hiring and training costs–that businesses with well-structured and executed CSR initiatives enjoy can also positively impact their bottom-line profitability. These factors have the further potential to impress stakeholders and stockholders, as well as attract new investors, making corporate social responsibility efforts a wise investment.
5 socially responsible companies
Like any other highly effective marketing strategy, corporate social responsibility has become a fairly mainstream business term used to virtue signal and attract attention. This makes it difficult to assess a company on a surface level if they are truly putting good back out into the world or just appearing to do so.
In order to give our readers a strong sense of what is meant by an effective CSR program, we’ve consulted several media outlets’ reports on CSR programs. Perhaps the most in-depth and comprehensive data on companies with high-performing CSR initiatives comes from Newsweek’s collaboration with Statista.
Below, we’ve featured five companies from our research that we feel exemplify the spirit of corporate social responsibility programs. As part of our profile, we’ve broken down the CSR programs each company is known for most, followed by guidance on how you might apply the same tactics within your own organization.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)
Hewlett Packard is one of the longest standing technology companies to come out of Silicon Valley, with its original founding in 1939 and its early line of audio oscillators used by sound engineers. The organization over the years branched out into cameras, calculators, and eventually into computers and printers. Today, HPE is a one-stop technology solutions brand that has leaned into its services and high performance computing products.
The brand has an extremely diverse and well-executed CSR strategy in place and is listed as the top overall organization on the Newsweek list. HPE receives multiple awards per year for the various programs that they undertake and they actively involve themselves and their stakeholders in a number of global initiatives.
Having won multiple awards for their ethical hiring and employment practices, we took a deeper dive into the brand to find out some of the personnel-focused initiatives they had in place, given that HP has joined many other firms throughout the tech sector in laying off a portion of its workforce.
HPE is one of a number of technology companies involved in the Neurodiversity Career Connector platform, a Microsoft site that connects jobseekers diagnosed with conditions such as autism, ADHD, or dyslexia to employers who are committed to hiring from this demographic. The site offers business owners who are interested an opportunity to also explore the talent pool and post jobs of their own.
Ecolab
In its 100 year history as a service provider focused on hygiene and infection prevention solutions, Ecolab has always focused on sustainability and protecting not only their customers but also the very resources we rely on to sustain life.
They remain focused on science-based solutions driven by data in order to best support food service safety, clean and safe work environments, and sustainability-focused renewable energy options and resource usage.
Ecolab’s services are designed to ensure they are creating a cleaner, safer, and healthier world. They work with other businesses in ways that help Ecolab to achieve their own corporate social responsibility-focused 2030 Impact Goals.
Ecolab’s cleaning products and dispensing systems are designed to help save their customers 300 billion gallons of water each year. Similarly, they are working to help their clients reduce greenhouse emissions by at least 6 million metric tons.
Ecolab’s full range of cleaning and sanitation services and products are intended to be diverse enough that they can offer most businesses a solution that will help make an impact.
General Mills
One of the most recognizable food brands operating today, General Mills ranked second overall in the Newsweek and Statista list of socially responsible companies. The company has grown from a single flour mill in 1866 into a collective of more than 100 brands spread across 100 countries.
Like most large corporate entities, General Mills spreads its CSR program across environmental protection, community impact, and its corporate governance practices.
One of the most impactful things an organization can do is to be transparent about where its economic donations are being distributed. General Mills’ corporate social responsibility page lists that it will be making a total donation of $250,000 across three separate sustainability projects, based on the input of its consumers.
This allows customers to feel they can directly guide the business’s CSR efforts, gaining their buy-in and trust. This is something any business can do through the use of direct marketing and social media campaigns.
Merck & Co.
The Merck brand has spent the last 130 years leveraging leading-edge science in order to provide innovative health solutions in the biopharmaceutical field and help save lives around the world. They take pride in fielding a diverse and inclusive workforce, and in ensuring that their health solutions are sustainable while still providing care to patients across the globe.
At a high level in its CSR, Merck works with global partners to break down barriers to health care access and institutes programs to ensure vaccines and medicines reach the areas they are needed the most. At a company level, Merck ensures that their own employees have access to the healthcare resources they need and they take a diverse and inclusive approach to doing so.
If your business is too small to subsidize group healthcare plans for your employees, there are still a number of resources that you can make available to your employees to ensure they are getting the care they need to remain healthy, happy, and productive.
S&P Global
Business leaders are becoming more reliant on data every day to make informed decisions about how to grow their business. S&P Global is one of the world’s leading research authorities focused on providing a combination of data, technology, and expertise to their community of clients.
The data provided by S&P Global’s platforms allows investors and business leaders to grow their own businesses and find opportunities to help others do the same.
In every community where they have a presence (which is a lot given their 35,000+ employees), S&P Global uses data and their resources to provide local communities with solutions to global challenges. One way in which they accomplish this is by encouraging their employees to donate time to local charities and organizations. In 2022 alone, S&P employees dedicated close to 20,000 service hours across 50 cities internationally.
Along with the volunteer hours, S&P Global donated over $4 million across more than 2,600 unique organizations globally. This approach to community-focused CSR is an option for any business to incorporate into their strategy, as there are always nonprofit organizations and foundations looking for support and funding in local communities.
Make corporate social responsibility a priority
If you’re not already incorporating CSR practices into your overall business strategy, you’re not only failing to help make the world a better place, you’re also missing an opportunity to capture the hearts and minds of your customers.
While they may prioritize your brand now, if they find that your brand isn’t giving back to the community or that you’re acting in ways that could be harmful to the environment and employees, it won’t be long before they’re looking to your competitors who have already broken the code on corporate social responsibility.
Connect with an expert HR consultant who can guide your team to help reshape and reposition your brand in a way that resonates with the higher standards of today’s average consumer.