GLOBAL - While corporate social responsibility (CSR) is still treated by some companies as a PR measure, investors see it as an integral way of rebuilding trust, according to delegates at a CSR conference in Vienna.
Antonella Mai-Pochtler, managing director at Boston Consulting Group, told IPE at a meeting organised by organised by the Austrian Institute for Cooperation on Development Projects (ICEP) "only those companies which are not taking CSR seriously and do not live it will consider cutting their funding of [CSR] in the wake of the credit crisis".
She suggested the sincerity with which CSR was approached was growing among businesses.
"The crisis is an ethical wake-up call for financial institutions and investors will increasingly be demanding to see CSR strategies put in place, while for the companies CSR is a chance to re-establish the lost trust base," said Mai-Pochtler.
She also claimed the financial crisis is a chance to redefine CSR because any CSR effort "should never be a one-off attempt but a sustainable, embedded strategy".
Wolfgang Ruttensdorfer, CEO of Austrian oil company OMV, and Uwe Fölster, head of sustainable development at packaging company Mondi, agreed and noted they could and would not make cuts on their CSR strategy now as it was "the way we run our business".
"I am sure CSR will survive the financial crisis because the drivers which are now requiring business to observe it have not gone away," explained Mallen Baker, founding director of Business Respect, a web-company promoting CSR worldwide.
"Customers and clients are talking to each other like never before thanks to new ways of communicating, and it will not disappear because CSR is about developing good relationships, which is now more important than ever before," he added.
That said, Baker warned CSR was no panacea: "CSR seminars would not have helped to prevent financial institutions from building a house of cards. It would have needed strength to go against the consensus and for one banker to stand up and say something was wrong - but that was in nobody's short-term interest to do so."
He noted the problem is often still a perception can be treated as "a question of what you do when nobody's looking" in part because CSR has yet to be embedded in many companies' business strategies.
When asked why CSR was still a little observed strategy by many Austrian companies, OMV's Ruttensdorfer pointed out domestically- operated businesses often do not see the necessity for corporate social responsibility as "everything is regulated by law anyway".
"That makes it difficult to differentiate yourself by specific CSR measures whereas operating in emerging markets you have to set your own rules and targets," arged Ruttensdorfer.
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