The HR Role: Promoting CSR

“The measure of any enterprise or institution is not what it says about itself, but what others say about it, and whether they choose to affiliate with it- as employees, as clients, as investors, as neighbours, as fellow global citizens.”

Formulating and translating corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy into actual managerial practices and outcome values remain ongoin challenges for many organisations. To this, HRM can play an important role in supporting organisations to address this challenge. HRM provides an interesting and dynamic support to CSR strategy design ad well as implementation and delivery.

According to CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development), HR profession has three-fold role in CSR:

1. HR makes sure people management practices are ethical.

2. Proper training and development of the employees and staff to embed in them the corporate responsibility.

3. The aim of HR should be to incorporate a culture of corporate responsibility in the organisation, including all the levels of management in the firm.

The various points highlight the role of HRM in promoting corporate social responsibility:

(a) Designing and implementing sustainable business models for the organisation and the HR function itself.

(b) engineer the organisational development and transformation programmes around the relevant human and social values.

(c) changes in the organisational structure of the firm in compliance with the changes in the technological as well as various environmental changes.

(d) strategic alignment in such a manner that develops a social contract between the firm and various sectors of the society.

(e) retention of the talented staff that recognises the need of social responsibility along with profit maximisation. This is done through the process of employee branding strategy.

(f) building a CSR culture through codes of conduct development and attention to fair labour practices.

The HR function, thus can significantly impact the development of a CSR culture through policy changes.

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