Hopping onto the CSR Bandwagon
Dalia Wahba - CID Consulting
The Egyptian revolution did a lot for its country. It brought down a tyrannical regime, re-established hope, brought members of the community closer and opened a whole new can of worms in the form of CSR overload. With patriotism running through sour society’s veins, everybody – including the big corporations – wanted a little piece of ‘Rebuilding Egypt’. They too wanted to send out an important message at a very important time. They wanted to be seen as equally patriotic as the rest of us and there was only one way to do that! Yes, you guessed it.
Everybody jumped on the CSR bandwagon and before you knew it, hundreds of teenagers were out on the streets, with brooms in hand sweeping the dusty streets of Cairo or painting its sidewalks in black and white while donning company branded logos and overalls.
Pictures were taken and stories of these heroic companies were splashed across the newspapers. What these companies failed to acknowledge was that the impact of their efforts were only immediate and definitely not long lasting. It took less than a week before trash found its way back on to the streets and the brightly painted sidewalks were back to being grey.
Some companies didn’t bother to make any effort at all. They just plastered the Egyptian flag onto their ads with a few claims of being proud to be Egyptian and thought ‘There! I guess that should do it’. From manufacturers of crystal chandeliers to mobile service providers to fast food chains, every brand made some form of patriotic claim. The fact that the revolution was suddenly ‘in’ lured brands into becoming part of the trend and even international brands like Kenneth Cole wanted to cash in on the buzz by hijacking the Cairo hash tag on twitter and shamelessly announcing that its new Season’s collection was behind Egypt’s upheaval.
CSR or Corporate Social Responsibility is an underdeveloped concept in the Middle East, one that’s usually used interchangeably with ‘charity’ or ‘donations’. Because there is still no concrete understanding of how integrating CSR into a company’s business strategy can actually make a difference to the bottom line, CSR has taken the form of Cosmetic Social Responsibility. It has very little to do with developing communities and a lot more to do with self promotion. As one study mentions, CSR isn’t about pursuing the CEO’s pet interest or just taking your employees for a day out to the local orphanage. CSR is a much more holistic approach to business, which is designed to enhance corporate success because of its relevance, rather than because it represents something unconnected to an organization’s core business. It involves a business identifying its stakeholder groups and incorporating their needs and values within the strategic day-to-day decision-making process.
Unbeknownst to many companies, CSR can affect a company’s growth. As McWilliams and Siegel underline (2001), firms that are socially responsible are considered by consumers to have a good reputation. A further study conducted by British Telecom a year later (the interrelationship between CSR and reputation) confirmed that CSR represents 25% of the reputational asset of the company.
In a nutshell, CSR is an important business strategy because different stakeholders, from consumers to suppliers to employees and even NGOs, all want to deal with a company that they trust and respect. And by satisfying these different stakeholders, companies demonstrate their commitment to another important stakeholder – their investors – who, at the end of the day, benefit the most when the needs of these other stakeholder groups are being met.
Employer branding – how to create an employer’s image?
Katarzyna Rek – Manager, Employer Branding practice leader, On Board Public Relations
Improving business development, strengthening competitive advantage, loyalty and building trust among employees, business partners and clients: these are all key objectives of an increasing number of Polish companies. But achieving these objectives is often connected with one critical component – a company’s reputation as an employer. For this reason, On Board PR has recently developed its ‘Employer Branding’ practice.
Employer branding includes several activities which companies and institutions adopt to build their image and perception as an attractive and desirable place to work; amongst both current and potential employees. Because of the different target groups, we can divide employer branding activities into external and internal operations.
Employer branding activities need to be planned and implemented with the long term in mind and as part of the whole integrated company communications strategy. But before an employer branding strategy can be developed, we need to answer a few important questions, for example: ‘how are we perceived at the moment?’; ‘what do we want to achieve?’; ‘what are our strengths and weaknesses?’; ‘what do potential employees NOT know about us, that they should know?’ We also need to find out more about our target group – what are they interested in? Where do they spend their time? What are their important core values at work? And, finally, what kind of communications tools can we use to reach him?
This last component includes building an EVP (Employee Value Proposition), which means creating and implementing those values that will be important for our employees and will define their work at our company.
At that moment, we also need to answer the principal question – what kind of employees are we looking for and why would they want to work at OUR company? Why are we better than our competitors and what can we offer our people? What is crucial, is that the answers to these questions must be completely authentic and achievable. If they don’t meet these criteria, an employer’s good reputation amongst its workforce can easily be destroyed.
There are several tools which can help us to build an employer branding strategy. One of them is social media, which not only allows you to reach very precise target groups – especially young people – but also to engage them, communicate with them and observe their behaviour. Social media is then an important source of knowledge for building an employer branding strategy and provides a great opportunity for feedback.
Designing and implementing an employer branding strategy and building a positive reputation brings many benefits such as easier and more effective recruitment, more candidates with better skills, increased motivation, engagement and improved efficiency at work. Moreover, it not only helps build the company’s reputation among current and future employees, but also business partners. We need to realize that the best source of information about our company is our people, providing the strongest argument of all for investing in them – they may become our best company ambassadors, in turn positively influencing and improving the future recruitment of skilled employees.
Change Management: Communication is vital!
Dr. Thorsten Hofmann - Managing Director, PRGS management consultancy
Everyday there are media reports about mergers and acquisitions, reduction in the work force and restructurings of companies. Once an exception, change has become an everyday issue – especially in economically rough times. Today, change is – bizarre as it may seem – an on-going process. It is multi-facetted, involves all parts of a company and may affect anyone at any time. In this process, communication management is vital for the success of the operation.
Human beings are known to be creatures of habit. Usually they react with scepticism when confronted with something new. The reason: Change brings with it incertitude, the familiar coordinates are taken away, people regard a change in their routine as a possible threat. Often, this makes employees less willing to participate actively in the change process. In this situation, a professional communication management is vital for the success of change. There is no “patent remedy”, because every change process has its individual challenges. Nevertheless, there are some basic aspects to pay attention to when communicating change:
Common Mistakes
A survey run by the German research centre Emnid underlines the importance of communication in change processes: More than 80 percent of change projects are bound to fail due to mistakes in communication. This is not surprising: Very often, there seems to be no common understanding of the challenges, no common set of values and, therefore, there is no common basis for communication within the company.
Moreover, the overall time frame and schedule of change communication seems to be triggering failure: Change is either communicated too early, too late or too soon within the process. When employees get the news about a change directly affecting them from the media first, they tend to interpret this as betrayal. If management decisions are badly explained and remain incomprehensible, people may feel left out. This atmosphere is a major source for the spreading of rumours that may become harmful to the process and difficult to stop.
So what does this mean – effective communication management in change processes? First of all, it is not only concerned with the hard facts and figures, but includes the “soft factors”. Those affected by change must be prepared by transparent, timely and comprehensive communication.
Social Media – A New Tool in Change Processes
Social Media have been part of change communication for quite a while. Due to a recent survey of the University of Stuttgart more than 40 per cent of the respondents have personal experiences with Social Media (two years ago, it was only 20 per cent). Most popular in the context of change communication are online surveys, virtual communities and wikis.
The advantages of using Social Media in change processes are evident: timeliness, improved networking, user generated contents and dialogue functions get those affected by the change involved into the process. It is the people themselves that become active participants in the change project. At the same time, these new tools provide new challenges: Using Social Media means following their own rules. Only those that stick to the rules of Web 2.0 can profit from the potential of Social Media in change projects.
First of all, one must remember: Not everyone is a “digital native”! There are still quite a number of people around – especially the older members of staff – that prefer classical communication to Web 2.0. Therefore, Social Media cannot replace traditional communication; they are but one tool more within the communication mix. Newsletters, personal interviews and meetings are still – despite all the hype about Social Media – the “agent of choice” in business communication.
Successful Communication
There are three aspects to make change communication successful:
- Strategy
What are the overall objectives of the change process? - Corporate Culture
What type of employees are needed in the new company? What kind of environment do they need to be productive? - Organisation
How shall the new company be structured? Which communication instruments are required at which point in time? And what are the main messages?
The more confident a company is and the more it integrates people into the process, the more will employees be willing to trust their employer. And this means that change will be more easily accepted.
Five Success Factors of Change Communication
1. Timely information policy!
Those in charge and employees must be informed on a regular and up-to-date basis. This helps to maintain the credibility of the board.
2. Emotionalisation!
Good communication appeals to heart and soul – facts alone cannot counter fear.
3. Customised Messages!
Define separate messages for individual target groups within the change process.
4. Communication means Dialogue!
Dialogue must be in the centre of all communication – one-way functions will not do.
5. Communication is Top Priority!
The will to change must be visibly supported by the whole board and must have a high priority. This includes setting practical examples by individual behaviour.
Dr. Thorsten Hofmann is academic director of the MBA programme “Public Affairs & Politics” of Quadriga Hochschule Berlin (www.quadriga.eu). He is managing director of PRGS consultancy (www.prgs.de) and chairman of the “Crisis Task Force” of the international communication network ECCO International Public Relations Ltd.
Why do companies need values?
Thierry Wellhoff, Chairman of Wellcom (ECCO France)
If there is a subject that comes up more frequently than any other in relation to corporate culture, it is that of values. Should this seem surprising? Values are at the heart of human groups. They are of concern to everyone, and everyone feels concerned by them. But what are the values in question? Are they moral values, for example “integrity” or “loyalty”, or those that are more orientated towards marketing, such as “proximity” or “forcefulness”?
Beyond the postulated, but unjustified, dichotomy between marketing and morality, if a company feels a need to formalise a system of values, this is because it has much to gain thereby. Whether they be used to defend an ethos or assert a difference, values can confer meaning on a company’s core preoccupations, lend coherence to its communication strategy and, in particular, contribute to building its reputation.
Such objectives are necessary because, apart from its primary function of producing goods or providing services, any company that wants to prosper and develop needs to be respected by those it deals with – its employees, of course, but also its customers and shareholders, the media, and civil society generally. And for this purpose it needs to elucidate and formalise the fundamentals that structure its approach.
The coherence of corporate and marketing strategies of communication, and in particular since the advent of the Internet, is more than a necessity – it is an imperative.
All of a company’s statements, but also those of its critics, may be given equal prominence by the different Internet search engines.
Information that is available to everyone – employees, shareholders, distributors or customers – immediately and everywhere, whether on an institutional site or a blog, implies rigorous execution, and also unprecedented conceptual discipline. A company needs to structure its discourse around lines of force that are transparent, enduring, profound and structural.
The conduct of business calls for a strongly asserted ethic. But building a reputation also requires that what a company says (i.e. its communication) be matched by actions (its behaviour, and that of its partners). This is where values demonstrate their full potential for harmonising word and deed.
It is in these three ways – conferring sense, guiding communication, and building a reputation – that a value system can be crucial for a company, provided that it avoids superficiality and puts the necessary energy into the task.
If these conditions are satisfied, a value system can function as a “genetic code” that will articulate a company’s diverse dimensions and give a clear direction to its strategy.
-Thierry Wellhoff