Starting a Business All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition

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 the business owners’ standards.

This chapter looks at adopting a ...