Abstract
Orientation: Many firms encourage employees to undertake corporate social responsibility (CSR) projects. With any project, it is important that firm resources are committed to create valued outcomes for stakeholders.Research purpose: The study purpose was to gain insight into criteria that can practically help define the success of employee run CSR projects.Motivation for the study: CSR activities are reported in literature as creating valuable intangible and tangible assets for firms when planned as strategies to improve brand reputation, customer loyalty and future profit. This research reviews a South African retail bank that promotes CSR undertakings to employees exploring the bank’s support for employees engaged in CSR.Research design, approach and method: Two of the bank’s completed community CSR projects were identified by the bank’s senior CSR managers for this review. Qualitative interviews were undertaken with employees, bank CSR managers and project recipients. Participant interviews were transcribed into text then analysed to identify where stakeholder value diminished on these projects.Main findings: The study found that this bank’s CSR processes do not fully support the employees, detrimentally affecting the ability of the employees to optimise project outcomes.Practical or managerial implication: Because employee CSR efforts are often aligned with a firm’s value creation strategies, optimising the project management of employee CSR activities can improve the value of the outcomes achieved.Contribution or value add: Determining specific conditions that influence successful project management of employee CSR projects can help to improve the potential of CSR projects in co-creating optimised value for stakeholders.
Highlights
Firms were engaged in corporate social responsibility (CSR)-related activities as philanthropy, giving money, goods and services as a benevolent act, not linking such actions strategically to marketable and profitable benefit for the firm (Madden, Scaife & Crissman 2006:50)
This research answers the associated questions: How do employees and the community engage for CSR initiatives? And, can this engagement be improved? This research used the assumption from the discourse on the South African CSR environment of Hinson and Ndhlovu (2011:73) – that Corporate Social Investment (CSI) is an integral element of CSR
CSR managers, supposedly skilled at understanding project management, released funds to this project. Literature suggests that both teams need the firm to have established CSR support processes but Project 2 in particular needed skilled help, which it did not get and which the statements that follow indicate was not part of the current employee volunteers (EVs) CSR project management support from the bank
Summary
Firms were engaged in corporate social responsibility (CSR)-related activities as philanthropy, giving money, goods and services as a benevolent act, not linking such actions strategically to marketable and profitable benefit for the firm (Madden, Scaife & Crissman 2006:50). This research looks at a South African retail bank’s CSR projects implemented by employee volunteers (EVs). The bank sees their efforts as a strategically project-managed contribution to bank value. Beasley and Frigo advocate that stakeholder inclusion for communication flow is essential to project success They and other authors state that firms have a responsibility to eliminate risks from arising in every business process, including CSR activity (Beasley & Frigo 2010:36; Hinson & Ndhlovu 2011:333; Van Os et al 2015:878). These authors argue that an indivisible CSI/CSR South African phenomenon has emerged, originating during the apartheid era as a local business philanthropic survival strategy for foreign firms wanting to operate within apartheid South Africa, and has continued as CSR (Hinson & Ndhlovu 2011:82)
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