The Importance of CSR Training Sessions
In a context where CSR regulations are extending across the entire economic field to become a norm, mere regulatory compliance is no longer enough. Indeed, companies have no other choice than transform themselves by integrating CSR into their DNA. In doing so, many companies recognize the crucial importance of relying on their employees to champion CSR. This goes beyond simple CSR awareness, necessitating an understanding of the employees’ own CSR potential, as they are the ones who implement the CSR requirements demanded of companies by regulations. Thus, to comply with regulations and mitigate risks arising from CSR concepts now framed by law, it is essential to identify how employees are positioned within the companies’ CSR activities.
Assessing Employees’ CSR Potential
Beyond training and sensitizing employees to CSR, companies must be able to evaluate employees’ natural affinities and reflexes in view of CSR issues. Understanding employees’ CSR potential allows for the most optimal response to transversal CSR challenges inevitably affecting, in one way or another, each function within the company. Similarly, it enables the creation of compatibilities between employees (including broadly collaborators working for the company without employee status) who often have different sensitivities within the same organization. It is here that human resources reclaim a key role in constructing the CSR approach, often entrusted in recent years to legal and compliance departments to meet the need for regulatory compliance.
The Reaffirmed Role of HR in the CSR Approach
Despite engaged legal departments, many companies have experienced difficulties in complying with regulations, as it was no longer just about following requirements, but about adapting internally to place ESG issues at the heart of operations. That led companies to seek solutions such as transferring responsibility for regulatory compliance to project management, data, or CSR experts, but difficulties persisted. Thus, some companies have gradually refocused regulatory compliance towards HR departments, seeing their decisive role in transforming organizations and meeting ESG data publication requirements touching employees and social dimensions.
CSR Regulations Requiring HR Support
This is evidenced by the management, collection, and analysis of ESG data on social aspects such as diversity, gender equality, and employee well-being. It is in this context that the use of new HR management tools, both for managing social data and for assessing employees’ CSR potential, becomes indispensable for companies. These tools have become essential to protect companies against legal, reputational, and operational risks related to the human factor, such as greenwashing, violations of internal policies, and erosion of workplace well-being leading to conscious quitting.
Towards Balancing Expectations via CSR Assessment Center
Finding the right balance between benevolence and exigency is crucial for HR and managers, to allow employees to thrive while facing the various inevitable ESG challenges. Understanding employees’ CSR potential, through their natural abilities to align with CSR approaches and concepts promoted by regulations, is thus essential to reduce CSR risks. In this regard, new tools to assess employees’ strengths around CSR are necessary. Among them, the digital Assessment Center dedicated to CSR will become indispensable for companies wishing to reduce CSR risks stemming from the human factor, and to seize opportunities to align with, or even exceed, the expectations of their stakeholders and regulations.