This should not come as any surprise — apparently there is a correlation between a company’s commitment to corporate social responsibility and its employees’ attitudes.

An article from PersonnelToday.com notes that, “seven in ten employees are positive about their employers’ commitment to corporate social responsibility,” which “has a positive effect on opinions about their employers’ sense of direction, competitiveness, integrity, and employee engagement.” The information in the article is presented in a rather odd way as it is not clear whether the company’s commitment to CSR has to actually create positive results, only that seven in ten employees have to feel positive about the commitment.

Hmmm. I can’t tell if this is a clever way of skirting less than ideal survey results or simply a lack of focus during the editing process. Regardless, I give the author the benefit of the doubt that the employees in the 70% bin are satisfied because of the progress of the company’s CSR efforts in addition to its commitment.

If the above assumption is correct, then it is possible to extrapolate for the employees that the noted “positive effect on opinions about their employers’ sense of direction, competitiveness, integrity, and employee engagement” should lead to greater retention rates. …and since we all know that high employee turnover can do some serious damage to a company’s bottom line (vs. a low turnover rate) I’d say that alone is a pretty good reason to take CSR seriously from a business perspective.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 11th, 2007 at 5:24 pm and is filed under Business Strategy, Corporate Social Responsibility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.