Understanding CSR

UNDERSTANDING CSR
Corporate social responsibility is a win-win tool for business entities. CSR policy functions as a built-in, self-regulating mechanism whereby businesses monitors and ensures its active compliance with the spirit of the law, ethical standards, and international norms.
Corporate social responsibility is basically a concept whereby companies decide voluntarily to contribute to a better society and a cleaner & healthier environment. Corporate social responsibility is represented by the contributions undertaken by companies to society through its business activities and its social investment. It also focuses on the concept of sustainable development. Over the last years an increasing number of companies worldwide started promoting their Corporate Social Responsibility strategies because the customers, the public and the investors expect them to act in a sustainable as well as responsible fashion. In most cases CSR is a result of a variety of social, environmental and economic pressures.
Due to the lack of international CSR guidelines, the practical application of CSR differs and CSR Strategies within most companies still show major deficiencies. There are still complaints about multinational companies wasting the environment and NGOs still denouncing human rights abuses in companies. Some critics believe that CSR programs are undertaken by especially multinational companies to distract the public from ethical questions posed by their core operations. That meanwhile even multinational companies such as Microsoft or Pepsi confess to their social responsibility, is discussed quite controversial.
While companies increasingly recognize their social responsibility, many of them have yet to adopt management practices that reflect it: company employees and managers need training in order to acquire the necessary skills and competence. Pioneering companies can help to implement socially responsible practices by guiding the processes.
For a business to take responsibility for its actions, that business must be fully accountable. Social accounting, a concept describing the communication of social and environmental effects of a company's economic actions to particular interest groups within society and to society at large, is thus an important element of CSR.
Increasingly, corporations are motivated to become more socially responsible because their most important stakeholders expect them to understand and address the social and community issues that are relevant to them. Understanding what causes are important to employees is usually the first priority because of the many interrelated business benefits that can be derived from increased employee engagement (i.e. more loyalty, improved recruitment, increased retention, higher productivity, and so on). Key external stakeholders include customers, consumers, investors (particularly institutional investors), and communities in the areas where the corporation operates its facilities, regulators, academics, and the media.
Basically, CSR means that a company's business model should be socially responsible and environmentally sustainable. By socially responsible it means that the company's activities should benefit the society and by environmentally sustainable it means that the activities of the company should not harm the environment. Nowadays what we can see is that there is an outburst of enthusiasm for environmental causes only. For eg. controlling pollution, global warming, deforestation, mitigate carbon emissions etc. Whereas it can be said that the same enthusiasm is not seen for social welfare. This is because most of the social welfare activities of the companies contribute to the welfare of us able bodied people but do not take into account the disabled people who are also a part of the society in which the company exists and who amount to at least 10% of the population. Therefore, disability must be made a part of CSR policies of the companies and people with disabilities must be allowed to become stakeholders.
Thus, carrying out business practice which includes disabled people will help improve the company's reputation and image in an increasingly competitive environment.


CS SEEMA SHARMA