Starting a Business All-In-One For Dummies

Chapter 3

Embracing Corporate Social Responsibility

In This Chapter

• Understanding corporate social responsibility
• Creating a CSR strategy
• Behaving ethically

Corporate social responsibility — CSR, for short — is a way of doing business that's rapidly gaining in popularity both in the United States and around the world. Corporate social responsibility is conducting your business in a way that has a positive impact on the communities you serve. CSR affects many different aspects of operating a business — from recycling, to ethics, to environmental laws, and much more.

Ethics and office politics are powerful forces in any organization. Ethics is the framework of values that employees use to guide their behavior. You've seen the devastation that poor ethical standards can lead to — witness the string of business failures attributed to less than sterling ethics in more than a few large, seemingly upstanding businesses. Today more than ever, business owners are expected to model ethical behavior, to ensure that their employees follow in their footsteps, and to purge employees who refuse to align their own standards with your standards.

This chapter looks at adopting a corporate social responsibility strategy, building an ethical organization, and determining the nature and boundaries of your political environment.

Understanding Socially Responsible Practices

CSR has been gaining traction within businesses of all kinds in recent years. At one time, CSR was the sole province of socially ...