When members of the UK committee
of inquiry into corporate social responsibility (CSR) delivered their
report to prime minister Tony Blair at the end of last year, they
warned there was ‘too much reliance on an existing leadership cohort’
of large companies. A greater number of small and medium-sized
companies had to become involved, they concluded.
A new
study on SME involvement has since appeared, and a report from the
Institute of Business Ethics is due to be published on 17 April.
Neither is linked to the committee of inquiry. Connecting SMEs with the
community reviews some CSR initiatives in this sector. It is published
by Business Community Connections (BCC), a non profit organization set
up last year whose trustees include Jane Mann, formerly with Ernst
& Young Management Consultants.
The study was based
on a postal survey last autumn of 500 senior managers in a random
sample of UK medium-sized companies, 19 of whom responded. This is a
response rate of 3.8 per cent, making it dangerous to draw general
conclusions about SME activity from the findings.
The
failure to respond to a postal survey may not indicate a lack of
interest on the part of SMEs. In BCC’s view, ‘it confirms, at the very
least, the time and resource pressures under which many SMEs are
working’. The survey also took account of the findings of other
researchers, and telephone interviews with key opinion formers in the
corporate community involvement debate.
A further 17 SMEs took part who had shown interest in the project, making a total of 36 companies. Among the findings:
most
of the community involvement by respondents was at a local level and
not recorded or publicised. Of the 34 respondents involved in
‘community causes’, only five had published information on it.
Thirty of the respondents thought that more should be done to encourage SMEs to become involved.
involvement
was often driven by the philanthropic urges of senior managers, who did
not view it as commercially important. ‘Many SMEs still need to be
convinced of the business benefits’, the report notes.
most
current community activity within the SME sector is uncoordinated and
occasional, even though three-quarters of respondents had been involved
in community causes for over five years. Cash donations were most
popular, (28 respondents) while 23 companies were involved in
sponsorships. Only seven of the companies carried out cause-related
marketing.
BCC recommends, among other things, that SMEs
should be encouraged to move from giving occasional cash donations to
‘more targeted contributions of time, facilities and expertise’. It
also urges more publicity of ‘transferable good practice from large
companies.’ More recording and monitoring of levels of community
involvement would ‘help inform the national debate and provide
benchmarking data for SMEs’.
For the forthcoming IBE
survey, Dr Laura Spence, lecturer in business ethics at the School of
Business and Management in Brunel University, interviewed 20 small
firms (defined as having fewer than 50 employees), 10 of which were
manufacturers and 10 service companies, and also surveyed 100 small UK
firms nationwide chosen at random.
A key finding, says
Dr Spence, will be that ‘for SMEs,employee relationships are very
important. A prime concern is retaining staff.’
The
institute plans to issue guidance later this year, possibly in the form
of 10 ‘golden rules’, on how more SMEs can become involved in CSR.
