CSR should be ‘weaved in’

Companies have been urged to think more about using existing communication channels to get corporate responsibility messages to employees, rather than looking for special ways to do so.

Delegates at the annual Business for Social Responsibility conference in New York last month heard that internal CSR communications too often rely on one-off presentations or reports that tend to set corporate responsibility aside from the day to day activities of employees.

‘You are already communicating constantly, so the key is to weave CSR into those conversations,’ said Kellie McElhaney, executive director of the Center for Responsible Business at University of California. She cited the example of US-based medical technology company Medtronic, which uses sales meetings ‘to drive CSR messages into different parts of the company’.
 
William Swope, vice president of corporate affairs at Intel, told delegates they should also focus on telling employees ‘stories’ about responsible business behaviour, rather than feeding them with data.