How can companies measure the effectiveness of corporate social responsibility?
Many companies are now releasing social responsibility reports, which follow the financial audit model, in order to audit ethics policies. These reports show what the company intended to do, how it approached this, and what it achieved. It involves doing surveys and interviews with employees, customers and suppliers, asking whether the company is honest and fair and if it has a reputation for integrity. Some companies have compliance officers who monitor whether they are following the law. However, a true, broad-based approach to ethics goes beyond doing what you have to do to monitoring how well you are doing it. On a final note, a solid ethical approach to doing business must come from the top down. You can have a written policy, but if your employees don’t see the company’s leaders embody it in concrete ways, it won’t be effective. CORDELL P. SCHULTEN, MA, JD, is a lecturer of business ethics at Fontbonne University. Reach him at cschulten@fontbonne.edu or (314) 223-8182.
