Your corporate social responsibility refers to the things you do and don’t do, the initiatives you support and how you do business on a daily basis. Typically, a company will set aside a page on its corporate website that goes into detail on corporate social responsibility, as well as outline it in investor presentations and annual general meeting documents.
Companies that don’t just pay lip service to CSR, but go out of their way to take it seriously can expect to enjoy favourable press and positive brand mentions as well as an increasingly large share of the socially conscious consumer market. Below are some of the ways you can add to your CSR today.
Green Banking
One of the easiest things you can do today that will have an outsized impact on your corporate social responsibility is to evaluate who you bank with. How and where you manage your finances can have a significant, though indirect impact on things like your carbon footprint and commitment to conservation. Banks have varying records on things like environmental destruction and protection through the kinds of companies they invest in or divest from.
Many banks and financial institutions are beginning to realize they have an important role to play in humanity’s fight against climate change and more sustainable living on the planet in general, and by choosing to keep your money with these institutions over more careless ones, you throw in with the group that is trying to make a difference.
Employee Benefits and Subsidies
If you have full-time employees, consider adding subsidies for greener transportation to their benefits package. This includes things like covering the cost of bicycles, e-bikes, e-scooters and even incentivizing the use of public transportation by covering some or all of the cost of a monthly bus or rapid transit pass. Our commutes have a measurable impact on global carbon emissions, and many people are likely willing to change their transportation habits if there is a financial incentive to do so.
Green Data Storage
Data centres are responsible for around 0.3% of global carbon emissions, which may not sound like much, but we are becoming a more data-hungry society every year. Green data storage means a few things. It means migrating to the cloud so that data use can be more easily scaled and controlled. It means running workloads in different time zones around the world so that servers aren’t running 24 hours a day. And it involves looking for storage and colocation centres that source some or all of their energy from sustainable or renewable sources.
Conclusion
Your corporate social responsibility matters, both intrinsically and because we are approaching a critical mass of socially and environmentally conscious consumers who expect the companies they do business with to care more. You can start off small with your CSR and build on, making changes when and where possible. There are all kinds of incentives for businesses to pay more attention to how they impact the world around them and simple things you can do starting today to help add real moral weight to your corporate social responsibility statement. Above are three such things to consider.
