(Illustration by Jacob Stead)
When leaders think about adopting a corporate social responsibility (CSR) practice, where should they start? Ryan Raffaelli, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, suggests that they should look closely at CSR practices that exist outside their organization.
CSR practices come in two basic flavors, according to Raffaelli and Mary Ann Glynn, professor of management and organization at Boston College, who co-authored a new study on CSR. Some practices—a charity walk-a-thon, say, or a weekend park cleanup—focus on “turnkey,” day-of-service projects: An organization can implement them from an off-the-shelf template. Others involve “tailored” projects that leverage the skills of an organization’s employees, as when Cisco Systems offers job training in network technology or Wells Fargo bank helps people prepare their taxes. Raffaelli and Glynn argue that a company’s decision to adopt one kind of employee volunteering program or the other depends on its relational ties to certain kinds of external networks. They identify two kinds, in particular. First, there are cross-industry communities of practice. And second, there are networks that consist of industry peers.
The researchers collected data from public archives, interviews, and observations of corporate involvement in CSR conferences. They also conducted a survey of Fortune 500 companies. Using those data, they tabulated the rate of CSR practice adoption within each industry. In addition, they measured each company’s participation in CSR communities of practice by noting whether the company had sent representatives to one or both of two leading CSR conferences (one hosted by the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy, and the other hosted by the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship). Of the 161 Fortune 500 companies that responded to the survey, about half had adopted an employee volunteering program of some kind (either turnkey or tailored). These adopters of CSR programs, moreover, tended to be companies in which people had attended one of the major CSR conferences. “Those that are engaged in these communities of practice are more likely to adopt CSR practices,” Raffaelli says.
Conference participation alone appears to be enough to support a company’s decision to adopt an off-the-shelf, turnkey program. But taking on a do-it-yourself, tailored program seems to require the presence of an additional factor. Raffaelli and Glynn found that companies tend to adopt tailored programs only when they have ties to both kinds of external networks—to a conference-based community of practice and to a group of industry peers that also sponsor tailored projects.
Adopting a tailored program is harder and carries more uncertainty than adopting a turnkey program, Raffaelli explains. But the ability to take cues from industry peers that have developed similar programs can reduce some of that uncertainty. And tailored programs are worth the risk, he says: “They have a much higher reward, because they get to the heart of who you are and what you do as an organization.”
Katherine V. Smith, executive director of the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship, notes that the experience of organizations that she has observed largely bears out these findings. Companies “appear to go further, especially with skills-based volunteering programs, when they participate in these networks and, more specifically, when they seek out industry peers,” she says.
Raffaelli hopes that his and Glynn’s research will advance the cause of corporate volunteer work. “One of the biggest challenges that organizations face, particularly in a nascent space like CSR, is that they don’t have the tools to know which things are actually the next big practice, and which things are going to fade over time,” he says. An awareness of how other companies are developing CSR practices is one such tool, Raffaelli suggests.
Read more stories by Jessica Ruvinsky.