I worked for a small weekly newspaper as a reporter in the 1980s. The publisher of the paper felt a great responsibility to be the “newspaper of record” for the community — to be the source of the most important events, and even some of the everyday occurrences that created the fabric of the community.

I believe internal communicators have a similar role. One important difference is that we are always using history to connect people to the organization so that the future is assured.

Robert

I recently produced a DVD/Webstream for the opening of a Data Centre, as it was the first time my client, a major bank, had outsourced this strategic facility. We wanted something to reflect the experience. Over 20 people appeared in the DVD, including some of the third party provider, as it showed the team work over two years, and the history of their very outdated facilities. The team enjoyed the collaboration and the webstream was very popular, with many hits on the Intranet and a great case history for the Global IT conference.

My interim role finished with the opening, but I recommended that it was used for IT inductions, to show the scale and scope that new hires could get involved with. It was a really great experience.

I feel an organization must create greater opportunity for ‘off-line socials’ as rightly highlighted by you in (c) for human bonding. There is also a need to build ‘trust’ in the very DNA of the organization so that sharing and flow of knowledge and intelligence take place naturally.

This can lead to faster and better quality of decision making too.

Cheers!

I agree mining information is an effective way to maximize your employees’ potential. That said, it requires the organization to be ‘open’ and to imbibe feedback.

Most organizations I know are moving towards mirroring internal networks on the lines of Linkedin and Twitter to get more employees involved and engaged. Leading to better reach of information.

I think an intelligent mining of employees using social media platoforms to understand connections and strenght of connections would be essential for larger firms. But for this to happen, there are two aspects which need to be in place..

– Deployment and Acceptance of corporate sponsored social networks
– Tools to mine these networks to determine role played by individuals

But considering privacy laws and other aspects, this might never see the light of day !!

Any thoughts?

First of all let me congratulate you on a well written and thought provoking article. You have raised some pertinent points and I wanted to respond to these…

At NF, we believe that corporate social responsibility / corporate sustainability, or any other term that business use, refers not just to community investment projects, but also to how a business ‘behaves’ in the workplace (primarily employee related), market place (related to customer, investors and vendors) and environment. Essentially we believe that any business entity is a part of a larger eco-system and must undertake to carry out its activities in a manner that constantly regenerates the eco-system.

Hence two factors need to be taken into consideration – (a) community investment projects are only one part of CSR and (b) employees are typically only involved in community investment projects, as their contribution in all other realms is considered a part of their job.

It is important to remember that when we talk of corporate social responsibility, we are talking of a ‘corporate’s responsibility and not that of individual employees. It is true that a business can and should instill a sense of active citizenship amongst its employees, however, its CSR efforts will be judged on the basis of what it does as a business and not just on the basis of what its employees do. I agree with the Business World article about moving away from the ‘ritualistic undoing of guilt’ type of activities that are ad hoc and dispensable. CSR has to be mainstreamed and for it to be an embedded function, it has to be a top down mandate.

At this point I would like to point out that community investment projects are largely employee driven in the IT industry in India. In fact responding to Ira’s comment, NASSCOM Foundation’s experience has shown that CSR in small and medium sized firms tends to be primarily employee driven while in larger businesses it tends to get institutionalised and in some cases gets disconnected from employees. In certain large companies, while corporate funds for community investment are channelled through the CSR division / corporate foundation, employee funds are controlled by employee volunteer committees.

Regarding the CSR Maturity Score in Catalysing Change 2008-09, while the Engaging Employees factor explicitly refers to employees, there are two other factors where employee contribution in terms of time and resources are considered – Organizational Importance and Source of Funds. In the former, volunteers drove CSR in 14% of companies in the research while many of the foundations are also run by volunteers. Under funds, 14% of companies use only employee resources for CSR while 55% use it as a supplement to corporate funds for community projects.

Finally, in the Catalysing Change 2008-09, when we have referred to employee engagement we refer to both employee driven CSR activities and those that engage employees in the corporate CSR activities. And it is important to note here that 93% of participating firms have employee volunteer programs, whether structured or unstructured. This is a very good indicator of the volunteer spirit in the IT industry.

The overall CSR Maturity Score of the IT industry in India is 59% which while positive shows that we still have a long way to go. Considering that the industry is relatively young, we have made a strong start and in the coming years will emerge as leaders in this area.

Sagarika Bose
Vice President – Research & CSR Advisory
NASSCOM Foundation

Cheers!

While it holds true for companies which are smaller in size, the involvement is more. However in a bigger company the its difficult just to track even broadly employees CSR beliefs. Comments?