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?

The question is quite relevant to this particular post.

If the CSR campaign is pre-planned and is part of your organization’s charter I see no reason to remove it from your plans unless the decision is driven by costs or resource utilization.

I am sure the ‘change management’ message is already underway since to communicate such mergers is time consuming and complex.

Hope this helps.

As we were brainstorming on various Internal comms activities we could adapt just after the announcement, I realised scrapping out the pre-planned CSR campaign earlier, will be prudent.

Should I continue with a CSR employee engagement activity in such a critical time or sort of run a messaging campaign which acquaints employees with ‘change’?

Cheers
Kabir

The trick is to clearly understand the value proposition of CSR and employee engagement as part of the strategy. Unfortunately, most of the time it appears to be about creating more ‘activity’. How many people showed up? How many hours were contributed? How many meals were served? These are important metrics, but they are not the point.

It’s kind of similar to customer relation management. If a business had a CRM strategy because everyone else did, but was unable to utilize it as a key tactic to improve their business, then it’s mostly a waste of time. CSR can be a great business strategy for productivity and growth. But not if the company doesn’t really understand why they are doing it in the first place.

But Aniisu, you wouldn’t have written such an insightful article if you didn’t already believe all this. So this is me, just agreeing with you.

Thanks,

Chris Jarvis
Senior Consultant, Realized Worth, Toronto, Canada

Hello Aniisu,

Thank you for sharing your views.

I am myself conducting focus group interviews to identify culture related issues in organizations as part of my doctoral thesis.

I find that in spite of all the methods to develop rapport, people are apprehensive of sharing information more so if they feel it is negative in nature and could be used against them if it gets conveyed by another participant in the group.

I found that individual interviews (though time consuming) and a validated instrument if used prior to the focus group, where the outcomes of those are put to question give better results because then it even gets confirmed at times in a veiled manner.

Should any of your colleagues want a culture audit be done (without any fees, but used for research purpose) and also be involved on how to do so, I would request you to ask that person to get in touch with me on my e-mail ID and I will follow up.

Thanks once again and regards,

Wg. Cdr. B. S. Mahal (Retd.)