CSR Not Understood by Over One-Third of British Workers

As companies, customers and investors recognise the importance their actions can have on people, communities and the environment, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a hot topic across the globe. There has been a significant rise in CSR performance, including indices such as the FTSE4Good, the Dow Jones Sustainability Index and Business in the Community’s Corporate Responsibility Index. Monster.co.uk recently asked British workers what they understood of the concept. Is it really as widely understood as some suggest, or does it still represent just another unfamiliar acronym that has been mentally filed away along with all the rest?

The Monster Meter asked: What does your company do in the way of corporate social responsibility? 405 Monster.co.uk site visitors responded revealing:

37% - What does corporate social responsibility mean?
31% - Not a lot
16% - My company has an active ’CSR’ programme
14% - I’m not sure, I’m not aware of any

The results tell us that 84% of employees either don’t understand the concept of CSR or are unsure if their company runs an active CSR programme. This should send a strong message to companies that they may need to do as much communicating to those inside their business about their CSR efforts as they are with the outside world, comments Brendan May, head of CSR at global PR firm Weber Shandwick.

Monster.co.uk has been proactively helping us [the British Lung Foundation (BLF)] by launching initiatives to help our fundraising efforts. Monster helped us to get fun runners for the London Marathon through a direct mail campaign to a database of potential runners. This was provided for free and helped us to meet our fundraising quota, stated Helena Shovelton, Chief Executive, BLF.

Andrew Wilkinson, CEO, Monster Worldwide UK adds: Working with the BLF showed us first-hand how an active CSR programme can have a strong impact on staff morale, adding a new dimension to how an individual feels towards his/her job and the company they work for. From the Monster Meter results it would seem that more effort needs to go into internally communicating details of any CSR activity a company is carrying out so employees can spread the word and promote the good their company is doing.

This survey highlights the urgent need to spread the CSR philosophy beyond boardrooms to the shop floor. Corporate Responsibility should not take place on a ’need-to-know’ basis - it exists for communities within companies as well as outside them. There is increasing evidence that people want to feel good about where they work. If they don’t know about the positive things their company does they can’t tell others. If you want your people to be your ambassadors, it’s essential to arm them with the stories you want them to tell, adds Brendan May of Weber Shandwick.

The results of the current Monster Meter are based on votes cast by Monster.co.uk visitors from 13th to 27th September. Only one vote per user is counted toward the final tabulation. The Monster Meter, a product of Monster, the leading global online careers site and flagship brand of Monster Worldwide, Inc., is a series of online polls that gauge users’ opinions on a variety of topics relating to careers, the economy and the workplace. Anyone interested in voting in Monster’s current online poll may do so by logging onto