Human Resource Management; Corporate Social Responsibility

Human Resource Management; Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate social responsibility is defined as the balanced integration of environmental and social concerns into business decisions and operations. Human resource management deals with recruiting, developing, managing and motivating employees, including providing specialised support and managing systems to foster regulatory compliance with human rights standards and employment standards. For Corporate Social Responsibility to work, employee involvement is paramount. Human resource managers have the tools to leverage employees to commit to the corporate social responsibility strategy. The best performing organisations foster a corporate social responsibility culture and integrate the culture in all their operations. Employees perform best when organisations align their strategies with employees’ values. Therefore, for corporate social responsibility strategies to work the organisation needs to incorporate corporate social responsibility into the employee brand. Corporate social responsibility strategies enhance the recruitment and retention of employees, most of all if they consider employees’ welfare. When corporate social responsibility is applied to the Human Resource toolkit, it results to a roadmap for human resource practitioners who want to fulfil the organisation’s sustainability aspirations, thus improving the social, environmental and economic conditions both locally and globally. This paper discusses the relationship between human resource management and corporate social responsibility.

Human resource managers have the tools necessary for helping their organisations to achieve the goal of becoming socially responsible. Human resource managers also have the ability to make their companies successful through corporate social responsibility since it enhances the financial performance of the company. Corporate social responsibility needs to be integrated into an organisation’s culture if it has to work out. HR can be quite instrumental in incorporating corporate social responsibility values in the company’s DNA. Many companies have failed miserably after financing corporate social responsibility initiatives at a certain period instead of incorporating the initiatives in the company’s culture. HR has a mandate to communicate and implement cultural and behavioural change, ideas and policies in organisations. This implies that they have a lot of control on employee culture. Employee involvement in the organisations’ culture is not simply the mandate of HR. However, HR can pave the way for shared responsibility. Thus, human resource managers need to understand their leverage with respect to corporate social responsibility, since the greater their understanding, the greater their ability to pass the insights to the employees.

There are several trends and drivers in relation to human resource management and corporate social responsibility. The trends show irrefutable evidence that when effectively implemented, corporate social responsibility can have a huge impact on developing, motivating and retaining staff. For instance, Novo Nordisk, a Denmark pharmaceutical company reported that they saw a 5% drop in staff turnover after implementing their high value corporate social responsibility strategies. Sears also reported a 20% reduction in staff turnover after adopting some corporate social responsibility strategies. Currently, global HR leaders are implementing incentive and appraisal systems that show sustainability as well as hiring people who embody these values. Recent research has shown that 50% of global managers hire personnel that is interested in sustainability. Research has also shown that HR leadership is not informed much on corporate social responsibility, as most of the managers are not involved with sustainability activities directly. Most of the managers participate in creating the strategies, yet a few of them are charged with the implementation process.