Recruitment Consultant Acre Resources Releases Corporate Responsibility Survey 2010

Recruitment Consultant Acre Resources today published their Corporate Responsibility Survey 2010. You can see the full survey and highlights here. They asked me to provide a commentary on the section addressing what we do…

The question in my mind is how much of the doing do we, the corporate responsibility practitioners do, and how much of the doing we try to get others to do. I consider the role of corporate responsibility practitioners is to engage with stakeholders to establish the CR strategy and policy, and then to set the groundwork that will enable, encourage and cajole stakeholders (mainly but not solely employees) to implement that strategy.

Our role should be as catalysts to embed corporate responsibility across the business. When a new issue arises we may have to do some of the doing ourselves in the first instance. However, this should only be as a means to proving the issue before we drive it to be addressed as a ‘business as usual’ operational responsibility thus freeing ourselves up to look over the horizon for the next unknown.

Over time, I would expect to see the functional components of the role, such as strategy, engagement and reporting, feature consistently in the top five activities. Themes such as climate change, ethical working conditions, or nutrition perhaps, will cycle through and feature only for so long as we are still determining the true impact of the issue prior to embedding it in the business.

It would be interesting to be able to look independently at the evolution of functional roles and themes and even examine where each theme is in its lifecycle; research, strategy, engagement, operationalization and hopefully, issue resolved!