How can you help organizations change to meet the corporate responsibility agenda

As corporate responsibility (CR) has developed over the past decade, companies have developed and communicated their formal values relating to environment, employees, stakeholders and governance through public statements. Many of these companies have produced formal reports covering their performance on environmental and social issues. Continued improvement and delivery of commitments depends on buy-in not just from senior management (and the CR manager), but from managers and staff across the organization. This is only possible if there is a culture that is supportive of corporate responsibility. One key aspect of making this change is understanding how the company's culture affects corporate responsibility performance. This paper discusses some areas of organizational culture that affect CR performance including rewards and recognition, learning and managing change, awareness and involvement, questioning culture and flexibility underpinned by mutual respect. It also provides an overview of our approach for assessing and fostering a supportive culture. This is based on working with clients to manage their licence to operate in addition to extensive experience in innovation culture and safety culture. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.