MVO VOOR HR aka CSR for HR

For those of you who speak Dutch, you will probably know what MVO VOOR HR means. For those of you who don't, CSR for HR might be more familiar. In just a few weeks, I will be in The Netherlands to deliver two exciting sessions on CSR for HR, organized and hosted by MVO Nederland.

MVO Nederland (CSR Netherlands) is the national knowledge centre and the national network organisation for Corporate Social Responsibility: the place to start for any entrepreneurs wishing to make their commercial operations sustainable. It's the "CSR Magnet" in The Netherlands. One interesting aspect of the MVO network is the Large Companies Network which now numbers 62 Dutch companies with over 500 employees. MVO launched their Education and Training Academy just this year, and have already hosted a range of fabulous speakers including Wayne Visser on CSR 2.0 and Veronika Scheubel on Corporate Community Involvement. I am delighted and honored to be a part of the MVO Academy's program this year.  

My sessions are as follows:

2nd April: A Masterclass for CSR and HR Professionals starting at 2:30 pm at Kasteel Worden.

The Masterclass will cover the business case for the CSR-HR partnership and the way managers of both professions can and should work together to deliver sustainable business strategy, with examination of risks, the opportunities and benefits of the CSR-HR partnership. We will relate this to the role of business in society and the platform this creates for CSR -HR collaboration. Then, we will zoom in on a few case studies that demonstrate these benefits, illustrating the shared roles of CSR and HR. Finally, we will discuss the CSR-HR Roadmap, Metrics and Scorecard, and how these fit into a sustainable organization's reporting strategy, with some practical tools to take away for implementation back in the workplace. Of course, culture, values and leadership will be part of this discussion.

3rd April : An Interactive  Masterclass for HR Professionals, in collaboration with the Nederlandse Vereniging voor Personeelsmanagement & Organisatieontwikkeling aka the Dutch Association for Personnel Management and Organization Development, starting at 9:30 am in Utrecht.

In this meeting, we will cover similar ground, this time working through the minds of Human Resources leaders. We will explain why CSR is now the way business gets done, the implications for the HR Profession, the risks and opportunities. We will review case studies that deliver benefit for the business, employees, other internal and external stakeholders and for HR Professionals themselves. In the second part of the session, we will break into groups to discuss some core issues and share experiences, challenges and best practices. We will focus on practical implementation of HR tools and processes, with a CSR mindset.  

Despite the fact that I do now understand what MVO VOOR HR means, both sessions will be conducted in English :) If, however, you want to read a little more in Dutch, you can see this article posted on the MVO website.

I am looking forward to some very stimulating discussion and the opportunity to enjoy the company of  friends in The Netherlands. I hope to see some of you there!

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

8 things that work in embedding a CSR culture

This week saw the release of an interesting report on the subject of Embedding Sustainability in Organizational Culture  by the Network for Business Sustainability. As anyone who has read CSR for HR knows, haha, CSR without embedding is like Chunky without Monkey. Yet embedding culture is no small feat and very few companies actually reach the point where it becomes a self-perpetuating feature of the way they do business, despite the fact that more and more CEO's are confirming that sustanability is the only way forward. The folks at NBS couldn't sit back and let this embedding thing get lost behind a wall of good intentions so they commissioned the most comprehensive research done to date on this topic, spanning 179 different studies and over 15 years of research.

The report itself is an academic study of  the embedding of sustainability initiatives and their outcomes based on review of a wide range of research papers. Each separate initiative is classified into its own unique place on a comprehensive framework moving through fostering commitment to clarifying expectations to instilling the capacity for change and building the momentum for change, defining a culture of sustainability as one in which "organizational members hold shared assumptions and beliefs about the importance of balancing economic efficiency, social equity and environmental accountability". The report classifies all the examples of initiatives supporting an embedded culture of sustainability into three classes: those which someone proposed but which have never actually been put into practice, those which have some practical backing as they have been shown to work as part of a broader intiative, and those which are supported by empirical evidence in research.

Unfortunately, most busy HR professionals will not want to crawl through 73 pages of academic analysis,and  the report does not include a handy summary list of all the things that work. So, I did the homework for you :)

Support - make it easier for employees to make choices that favour sustainability. Examples given include providing corporate vans for ride-sharing, or ensuring management support for employees' sustainability activities

Model - enact the roles and behaviours organizational leadership wishes employees to emulate. Well, we all know how important it is to talk and walk the talk, right ? The opposite is also true, according to this report, for example, when a CEO denounced green iniatives at a Christmas party as nonsense, it dampened the greening efforts being undertaken. That was back in 2002. Wonder if he is now a green CEO or an ex-CEO ? 

Allocate - back up the commitment to sustainability with an allocation of time, money, and people. Ah yes, budgets. That's where things always seem to stick.

Create roles - expand existing roles or develop new roles within the organization to capture essential sustainability responsibilities. Hired your Chief Sustainability Officer yet ?

Train - training employees in systems or procedures related to sustainability. Actually, it suprises me that I don't see sustainability as a core element of management training in most companies. I think it's a subject that is important enough to every single role in the organization that it should be as commonplace as safety or quality training.

Frame - construct and present a fact or an issue from a sustainability perspective. Talk about sustainability as quality, or as safety, or as a financial return to the business, or simply as "the right thing to do". Deliver sustainability messages in clear language. That's what the NBS report says. Oh, and I say, hold off on the jargon and the acronyms. IMHO.

Champion - champion  individuals who defend a cause or a course of action supporting sustainability. Internal champions, the evidence shows, seem to be more effective than external. Yep, I'll buy that. Even though I am a consultant.

Experiment - encourage employees to try new things or develop their own solutions. Agree. It's amazing what people come up with when you let go of the leash for a while. This is especially important in fostering a culture of innovation, the sister of sustainability.

All the above, however, are the tip of the iceberg of what you can find in this review. It includes many more interesting aspects of embedding sustainability and  is peppered with specific examples from different companies. In many cases, even if there  no specific proof that the intiatives mentioned actually work, many intuitively sound right. In any event, the range of initiatives covered are surely a great source of ideas and can serve to spark some creativity in your own attempts to develop a sustainability-enabled culture.

My advice:

Take a look and use this review as a reference guide as often as you need it.

Alongside CSR for HR, of course.  

 

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

Green HR, Top HR, Exec pay and Embedding CSR via HR

Five more interesting resources on CSR and HR and the intersection of both:

Combine your Green and HR Efforts (published in December 2008)
This article is subtitled "reducing your environmental impact one employee at a time" and was referred to me by Twitter friend @cathyj131.  The point is that HR can make a big contribution to the greening of a Company. We all agree, for sure.

Today's HR Executives : How Career paths have changed - and stayed the same
Thanks to @claytontford for referring this article.It is about the changing nature of HR career paths and HR careerists, and ends up with a quote "Human resources is a crucial point of intersection between the broader society and business." The full research paper, providing the basis for this article, on attributes of HR Leaders,  by  Dr Peter Capelli and Yang Yang can be downloaded here

More Businesses Tie Executive Compensation to Environmental Metrics, published May 2010 on Environmentalleader.com . The article says that companies are realizing the power that executive pay policies have on environmental perofrmance. Good development.

Lloyds looks to train “every manager” in sustainability, published on Greenwisebusiness.co.uk , May 2010. Thanks to Fabian Pattberg for his post on the Sustainabilityforum.com for alerting me to this article. Clearly, ensuring managers know how to advice customers is a necessary element of advancing CSR.

The most heard words at the Responsible Business Summit 2010 were "DNA" and embedding. Article posted by Pam Muckosy, chief researcher at Ethical Corporation, in May 2010,  on how CSR is embedded in the business. She quotes figures from a research paper Ethical Corporation published last year.  Actually, I reviewed this paper in a number of posts on my CSR Reporting blog:
Embedding CSR in the Human Resources function
Embedding CSR in the procurement function
Embedding CSR in the Finance function
Embedding CSR in the Operations and Logistics Function
Embedding CSR in the Corporate Communications Function

Don't forget to keep me posted of interesting things YOU come accross!

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainabilty Reporter, HR Professional. Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen  on Twitter or via my website www.b-yond.biz/en