The highest-minded corporate policies on procurement or carbon measurement are ultimately realized by the workforce.

By Elliot Clark

We just completed our CR Magazine Best Practices Survey. With 650 executives from hundreds of companies responding, it could be the largest corporate responsibility survey in history. We want to thank our partners, the NYSE Euronext, for unprecedented access to their listed companies as part of our ongoing partnership, through which we offer our responsibility programming and research to their network.

My own domain expertise, in addition to being the CEO of the company that publishes CR Magazine, is in the area of human resources. Specifically, I have spent my life working on issues related to workforce talent, recruiting, and diversity. These issues are always an expression of the company culture, the personality of the leadership, and their commitment to good values. Frankly, if they have poor values, the first place you can usually find it is in a confused and disgruntled workforce.

One of the questions that we asked in the survey was whether the respondent’s company “has publicly declared specific and measurable goals” in a series of areas.

The results are shown in the table below:

The practice of corporate responsibility is still forming. Many people applaud our efforts to drive transparency among large-cap companies and to professionalize the practice of corporate responsibility at all companies. Many of those same people tell us we are ahead of the curve.  Clearly, we were not shocked that Environment, Health and Safety ranked first. We were surprised, however, that Human Resources ranked second—above Corporate Social Responsibility.  We also were impressed by how widely it was recognized that HR is a significant part of the corporate responsibility agenda.

In truth, a significant crossover exists. Workplace diversity, ill treatment of minorities, and gender discrimination all still exist, though we are making progress. Where they endure, they are more subtle. They have gone underground. 

Hiring initiatives and worker outreach are important. Workplace programs can communicate and align employees with the corporate mission, gain volunteerism, and get them excited about the corporate citizen programs and their opportunities to help recruit and retain talent. We also see HR helping to coordinate job-sharing programs to support working mothers and fathers and telecommuting programs that reduce carbon footprints.

HR is important to human rights as well. Though its reach does not extend to the supply chain, it is the watchdog for company-managed facilities worldwide. It is the monitor of compensation policies, and most often the Chief HR Officer is the liaison to the Board of Directors Compensation Committee on executive pay, a particularly sore point in the past few years. A company such as the GAP, which has been a model of corporate citizenship, is among those that have chosen to vest authority over HR and CR in the hands of a single executive, Dan Henkle, who has graced the cover of this magazine.

At the recent Economist Corporate Citizenship Conference, Dina Habib Powell, Global Head of Corporate Engagement at Goldman Sachs, discussed their 10,000 Women Initiative, designed to help educate 10,000 underserved women around the world. The program was over-subscribed with employee volunteers. Her role managing “corporate engagement” speaks for itself in an effort to engage and align the workforce.

As the role of the Corporate Responsibility Officer becomes more fully developed, we will see former HR executives populating the career paths feeding these ranks. The HR community also wants to be more involved in corporate responsibility. The nobility of this undertaking appeals to their mission-driven personalities.  I also believe we will see further intertwining of the agendas of human resources and corporate responsibility, as galvanizing the workforce will be seen as the way to achieve significant long-term improvement in key metrics that measure environmental impact, social responsibility, ethics, and compliance. People are, after all, the significant driver of all agendas, and CR is one of the most important.