Small but with a BIG corporate social responsibility strategy!

CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility, is about giving a voice to the employees, involving the customers feedbacks into the business processes and listening to the stakeholders before planning any strategy.

CSR is about investing today for a long term successful return.

CSR is about values, people and innovation and it is an important and necessary aspect that any company should consider while developing the strategy, making decisions or delivering products.

Is CSR only for big corporations?

Often the big corporations are the ones giving more and more visibility to the CSR policies through reporting and marketing initiatives and the ones dedicating more resources, human and financial, to the CSR related activities.

But not having a specific dedicated CSR team or a sustainability report doesn’t mean not being able to develop a long term, integrated and succesfull CSR strategy.

Being small means being flexible and having smooth business processes that can be easily assessed, evaluated, measured and improved. It means also being fast, SMEs (small and medium enterprises) can indeed make quick changes and better respond to the customer needs or demand.

Being small means also being closer to the territory, to the local communities and to the stakeholders and have a direct relationship with suppliers, consumers, employees. This translates in being more aware of the stakeholder expectations and interests, knowing how to engage with them and therefore being more sustainable.

In conclusion is not a matter of size but a matter of innovation and capacity to find new sustainable business models that better respond to what the stakeholders demand. CSR is a matter of value creation, transparency and bidirectional communication and should be an integrated part of every size company.

Interested in developing a CSR strategy in your SME? Here some useful tools..

In order to facilitate the CSR strategy implementation in the small and medium companies the European Commission has published a guideline aimed to maximize the creation of shared value for the SME owners, shareholders, stakeholders and society: Tip and Tricks for advisors, Corporate Social Responsibility for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises.

In the guide there are useful recommendations on how to follow a CSR roadmap, how to prioritize the stakeholders requests, how to start from skretch and there are several practical tools and online resources that can help SMEs to plan and implement a strategic CSR strategy. Here some of them:

Self-assessment handbook for companies. Very often the SMEs have good business practices without being aware of it or without consciously having a specific CSR strategy, this tool help them to assess their business processes and practices.

SME Guide on human rights.

The SME blog of the Network for Business Sustainability.

The Ecotoolkit, an online platform with practical tools for SMEs consultants aimed to monitor and reduce the environmental impact.

A guide on SROI, a good resource on Social Return on the Investment.

Transparency Project, a catalan initiative in collaboration with GRI aimed to incentive the collaboration between multinational companies and SMEs for CSR reporting activities.

CSR Compass, an online tool for supply chain CSR strategy.

Ideas compass, a web platform aimed to inspire the SME toward innovation and sustainability practices.

3 comentarios / 16 Apr 2013 por Veronica Recanati
IMSD /

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