CSHR going global

CSR for HR in Germany

I was delighted to be asked to give a 9 hour course on #CSR for #HR to Masters students in May for the Steinbeis University in Berlin, Intitute for Corporate Responsibility Management. I had anticipated 9 hours being rather a lot, but they all flew by with some interesting questions and debates. Apparently, CSR for HR is quite a big subject :)

This is how the schedule looked (3 sessions of 3 hours each).

As always, preparing lectures helps me get my thoughts together and think more deeply about things. For this lecture, among other things, I considered the question of what's material for the HR Manager, and offered a generic materiality matrix for HR managers. This will of course change from company to company, but here is the matrix I developed for students to get an understanding of the scope and relative importance of different issues on the HR Managers annual work schedule.

As with any function, having established materiality, and developed an action plan, the key thing you should always want to know is what success will look like when it's all done. Here, I showed students a sample HR Scorecard which is not exhaustive, but generally explores the sort of metrics that the CSR Manager could adopt to measure sustainable HR performance.

CSR for HR in Mexico

I also delivered a lecture on CSR for HR to Business Executives from a range of business functions studying in a University program in Mexico. Again, this generated some interesting insights and gave me hope to believe that the discussions back at the workplace will be even more interesting.

CSR for HR in India

In February 2012, I will be honored to deliver a lecture at the HRD World Congress in Mumbai, India, alongside a series of impressive speakers. This is the conference's 20th anniversary and it always draws a large and important crowd of delegates. It is refreshing to see an HR conference that places Sustainable HR Management squarely on the agenda.

CSR for HR in Gernamy (again)

This month, my article, The Seven R's of Sustainable HR Management, appeared in the June Edition of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Personalfuehrung magazine. In this article, I present a model of seven steps to sustainable HRM, with each step beginning with R. 

The idea is to Re-vision in order to leverage the corporate vision or mission into something which is meaningful to all employees and goes beyond the financial purpose of the organization, reflecting a broader social purpose. Making a positive difference in people's lives is much more engaging than simply growing revenues and profitability. Reality check suggests that the HR Manager needs to look well beyond the management team and the employees to understand both how HR practices are impacting on society and the environment as well as what these broader stakeholder groups expect from a business. Re-assess means reviewing all strategic HR policies and practices to ensure the fit with the sustainability agenda. I suggest process for an HR-Sustainability Gap Analysis which starts from business needs and ends up with required sustainable HR pratices. In Re-frame, the HR Manager must ensure there is alignment between different aspects of HR policies in the areas of: values and ethics, recruitment, talent management, training and development, compensation, welfare and wellbeing programs, health and safety, internal communications and general support for society and environmental issues. Rate implies establishing clear targets at the outset and ensuring that every individual has performance targets which make the connection with sustainability objectives. The HR Sustainability Scorecard mentioned above may assist in this process. Reporting is about disclosure of HR sustainability performance. HR metrics are included in Sustainability Reports and the Global Reporting Initiative, the most widely used framework for sustainability reporting around the globe, includes 25 specific performance indicators which fall within the scope of HR Management policies and practices. Finally, Repeat means do it all over again, as the business environment is dynamic and strategies are continuously adapted to meet new needs. 

It is encouraging to see that CSR for HR is going global. Let's hope that HR Managers are at long last waking up to CSR!

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainability Reporter, HR Professional, Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices.  Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen on Twitter or via my website www.b-yond.biz/en

Ralph Thurm reviews CSR for HR

There's somethng wonderful about reading a great review of a book you have written. It's more than feeling great about getting positive feedback. It's more about the fact that, when someone takes the time to read a book, and is driven to write about it afterwards, you feel that your efforts have not been in vain and that your message is getting through. I have been fortunate in that many respected and accomplished people have read and reviewed CSR for HR, and the most recent is Ralph Thurm.

Ralph is a mover and shaker in sustainability. He is a leading professional in sustainability strategies, operational sustainability and sustainability reporting. With more than 20 years experience working for major corporates, industry federations, governments and NGOs all over the world, Ralph adds value as a consultant, trainer, moderator or writer on a huge variety of sustainability topics. Ralph spent years as a sustainablility leader with Siemens, three years as Chief Operating Officer of the GRI, and is currently Director, Sustainability Strategies at Deloitte in The Netherlands. Ralph is always at the centre of whatever is going on in sustainability circles. Read his post about his meeting with Al Gore and you can get a sense of the breadth of Ralph's appreciation for core issues, or read his entry in the Harvard e-book on Integrated Reporting (part VIII - perspectives on an action strategy, page 218),  and you get a glimpse of his vision and hopes for corporate sustainability and reporting strategy.

This is Ralph's review in full, which you can find here, posted on his blog A|HEAD|ahead.

"If one looks at the development steps of CSR in the last decade it became painfully clear that the paradigm change towards sustainability needed to be implemented in all company’s functions. Overcoming the silo thinking to empower better and a more holistic awareness-building and integration of CSR was/is obviously needed if an organization will also thrive in the future. All in all we need to admit that we have been extremely busy with the technicalities part of this task, often forgetting the people part of the story. It is so easy to believe that if an organization has done its homework on management systems, data systems, governance, reporting and measurement, one could wait for the outcomes to simply come as a given. One of most often forgotten pieces in the puzzle was the Human Resources function of an organization.

Finally there is help! Elaine Cohen, one of the most active bloggers in the field, living in Israel, and running Beyond Business Ltd., a small CSR consultancy there, has created an enormously useful baseline through her book ‘CSR for HR – A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices’, a must read for everybody who either works in the HR function and wants to develop a view on how to support CSR in their daily life, or for everybody outside the HR function looking for arguments why the HR function has an important role to play and needs to overcome some genuine mental stereotypes.

Elaine uses a nice plot for a whole array of protagonists that would argue for and against a role of HR in CSR: her main protagonist Sharon is actually one of those. Over a couple of weeks Sharon goes through a metamorphosis from being an HR Manager and more and more becoming a CSHR Manager. The nice way of telling the story in a plot like this is that more or less all arguments that one could run against in this challenging metamorphosis comes back in the book, and in that sense delivers refreshing yet convincing arguments any reader can use from the next day onwards.

Another important point to make about Elaine’s book is that she has interwoven the plot with a lot of readymade materials (slides, checklists, book summaries and articles) that can be used as blueprints for readers to start their own pilgrimage. In essence, reading Elaine’s book saves the reader a lot of time reading other articles and books.

One of the main takeaways also having read Michael Porter’s newest article ‘Creating shared value’ in HBR 1/2011, is how the book already plays very well into the needed change that HR also needs to make, namely the shift form ‘HR as an impact ON staff’ towards using the HR function to ‘create an impact OF staff’.

To sum it up: Elaine Cohen’s book is the right book at the right moment, written in a very useful way that makes it ‘ready to use’ from day 1 onwards. There is no excuse any longer for HR practitioners to ignoring CS’HR’ due to the lack of a ‘cooking book’ of recipes. The roadmap how to embed is included in the book as well – of course! "

I would like to express my thanks to Ralph for reading and reviewing CSH for HR.  I am sure his influential voice will help spread the message that it is time for HR to wake up to CSR!

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainabilty Reporter, HR Professional, Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices.  Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen  on Twitter or via my website www.b-yond.biz/en