Corporate Social Responsibility: A mantra for business to emerge as strong brand with purpose

Authors: Joydeep Sen and Jhimly Baruah

Preface: This is the first part of series on CSR and its potential. We thought of sharing our experience of leading CSR programmes and advising various companies to implement CSR programmes. Our experience of working with community and government also helped in shaping different thoughts shared in this series.

As companies start implementing CSR programmes, they face increasing pull and push from both internal and external stakeholders. Internally sales and marketing teams feel that it is important to invest CSR money on the geographical locations where they have bigger market share. This helps them to drive equity as well as gives them social license to operate. Externally the bigger challenge comes from government, regulators and other quasi-government bodies who expect corporations to invest their CSR money in projects which will give maximum mileage to their departments or ministries. This internal and external push puts a lot of challenge for the CSR implementation strategy. This then becomes a question at balancing the expectations of the stakeholders and not necessarily addressing the immediate needs of the community.

However, as leaders and managers we need to treat every challenge as an opportunity to maximize the benefit for larger good of the society. These challenges can be mitigated by putting in place the following processes:

·# First having a clear vision and a road map for CSR. Conduct a visioning exercise with your internal and external stakeholders such as your independent Board of Directors, team leaders from different departments within your company, government functionaries and the community to understand the need, map challenges and opportunities.

# Any CSR programme needs to be aligned to your company’s business so that your company’s leadership sees the value and takes ownership of the programme. It is essential to have the buy -in of the leadership which would ensure that different departments within the company support the CSR programme wholeheartedly.

# Based on your visioning exercise, update your CSR policy to focus on the needs of the community, identify the geography of implementation and align your companies CSR programme with the government’s priorities.

# Ensure that your programme is aligned to the national goals and priorities. Let’s say your company works in health, then it is important to identify the programme as per the priorities of National Health Policy. In this way you are not only meeting the priorities of the company but also the priority of government.

# Companies also needs to understand that CSR is just not a regulatory requirement under Section 135 of the Companies Act. Ministry of Corporate Affairs is expecting companies to treat CSR programmes with the same high-quality management standards with which they treat their other departments like sales, marketing, finance etc. Therefore, companies need to have proper CSR team and put in place systems and processes which are of highest standards.

# CSR programmes in the company needs to be led by people who have training, experience, expertise and understanding of the social sector. Therefore companies which are serious about their CSR programmes will recruit people who have social sector experience but also have a good knowledge of the corporate culture. A good CSR leader with requisite experience and leadership will ensure that company implements the CSR programme which is of highest quality and set benchmarks for others to follow.

# It is also important to identify good implementing NGO partners who have excellent technical knowledge, experience in community outreach, good in-roads in government machinery, professional team, good programme and financial management skills as-well-as documentation and communication abilities.

# Having a good NGO partner will ensure that you have a dedicated supporter who will help you to implement company’s CSR policy with high quality to ensure impact and meet regulatory requirements.

#  Proper management processes like SoPs, monitoring & evaluation system, risk management strategies, reporting mechanism and documentation should be integral part of CSR programme. This is important as quality data and evaluation will help companies to accurately report to regulators and also take right decisions for high quality programme implementation

At the end, success of any CSR programme can be only measured through community satisfaction. Crucial point is that quality of the programme should be good so that community is able to see the benefits and the programme is able to impact the national indicators.

If the community sees the value of CSR programmes and they are your advocates then it is easy to manage any challenge from internal and external stakeholders. Companies like the Tata group had understood this vision a century ago and have emerged as a strong brand. Now it is the turn of the other companies to recognize this potential and emerge as strong and reputed business groups.