This page describes our social impact and performance.

Employees
Clients
Workshop Participants
Advocacy
Public Benefit Research

Employees

Our goal: Our goal is to attract and develop the highest quality employees, provide a satisfying work experience and a pleasant work environment.

Our impact: To learn more about the team at ACCSR click here. We also hire contractors as required. In the reporting period ACCSR’s major contractor was John Collins, who is now Assistant Director at the Centre for Public Agency Sustainability Reporting.

ACCSR complies with statutory obligations regarding superannuation. Our default superannuation fund is VicSuper.

In the reporting period ACCSR recorded no workplace injuries, lost days due to injury or work-related fatalities and there were no incidents of discrimination, either with staff or with external stakeholders.

All staff completed an average of 50 hours per annum in training and professional development. All staff receive semi-annual performance appraisal and participate in a weekly staff meeting, to review business progress and achievement of individual and client goals.

ACCSR also has an employee volunteering policy, permitting each employee one-day a year for voluntary work with a social or environmental organisation of their choice. Due to the demands of our pro bono advocacy and research program we have not yet implemented this policy but we aim to do so in the next reporting period.

Clients

Our goal: To provide advice that works - by helping clients understand, manage and improve their social performance

Our impact: We asked some key clients to consider how they believe we have delivered on our goals. Here is what they said:

While discussions with consulting clients are informally conducted throughout the life of projects and after delivery of agreed outputs, we intend to seek our clients’ co-operation to develop and implement a more structured evaluation process in the next reporting period.

Workshop participants

Our goal: To provide education that works - by helping workshop participants improve their ability to implement CSR

Our impact: We routinely seek both qualitative and quantitative performance feedback from workshop participants to ensure we can keep improving our programs.

The two graphs below summarise participant satisfaction during the reporting period with our
Experience CSR (licensed content) and ACCSR workshops (proprietary content). Each satisfaction criteria score is the mean of all individual responses for the year at a number of programs.

Satisfaction of workshop participants with both our licensed and proprietary programs is very high. However, on some criteria participants rated us “good” more than “excellent” in 2007 whereas in earlier years a higher proportion rated the programs “excellent” than “good”. Qualitative feedback provides no clues to this small decline in satisfaction. Participant suggestions for improvements to workshops have been rare.

We believe the slight decline in satisfaction may be a response to the increasingly competitive environment for CSR learning programs. As participants are faced with more choices for CSR learning, their expectations rise. We are very alert to the need to continue to improve our workshop programs in an increasingly demanding environment.

The process of compiling workshop feedback into a single dataset helped us to understand that we have gaps in our evaluation. We are now revising our workshop participant engagement and feedback processes to ensure the information we obtain from participants is actionable and that we continue to develop and offer learning programs that meet needs of Australian organisations.

CSR Connect.ed
We held three networking and professional development functions over the reporting period under the auspices of our CSR Connect.ed program. CSR Connect.ed enables ACCSR’s past workshop participants to stay in touch and keep learning in an informal manner. During 2006 (when it was launched) and 2007, each of the three CSR Connect.ed events has brought to the fore a topical issue in CSR for practitioners to debate. These events were hosted and made possible through the kind sponsorship of Transurban, Westpac and ANZ Bank. These events are free to past workshop participants.

Advocacy

Our goal: To influence the environment for CSR to encourage greater take up of CSR by companies

Our impact: ACCSR is actively involved in the uptake and promotion of CSR in Australia. During the reporting period we received no fees or payment of any sort to conduct our advocacy work.

As a small business, our commitment to pro-CSR advocacy has at times created significant strain because of the need to balance this work against our economic needs.

During the reporting period we have participated in four policy inquiries into CSR:

• Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services inquiry into corporate responsibility (together with Paul Hohnen) (2006)
• Corporations and Markets Advisory Committee inquiry into corporate social responsibility (2006)
• Australian Securities Exchange Corporate Governance Council review of the Corporate Governance Principles (2007) and
• Victorian Parliament Family and Community Development Committee inquiry into the involvement of SME business in corporate social responsibility (2007)

We have also produced three position papers, further elaborating key issues. To read these position papers click here.

Our Public Benefit Research

Our goal: To further support the development of CSR in Australia through evidence based research.

Our Impact: The two research questions we pursued in our public benefit research during the reporting period were:

• What is the nature of the emerging CSR management function?
  Read the report here (259 KB PDF)
  
  
• Can CSR deliver competitive advantage in industries where participants face similar constraints and issues?

Our major partnership is with the Monash Governance Research Unit at Monash University. Leeora Black’s role as an honorary research associate in the Faculty of Business and Economics at Monash University has helped facilitate this partnership. Our aim through this partnership is to stimulate and contribute to the development of new knowledge on CSR. During the reporting period we undertook an industry study of corporate social responsibility together with MGRU, which contributed $25,000 towards the project.

The study, titled “Validation of CSR capabilities model in a single industry setting” received ethics approval from the Monash University Standing Committee on Ethics in Research involving Humans (SCERH) in 2005 (SCERH Reference 2005/780LIR). The goal of the research was to understand whether corporate social responsiveness can be a source of competitive advantage for companies in an industry where participants face similar constraints and issues. The research was conducted through surveys and face-to-face interviews and involved the participation of four La Trobe Valley (Victorian) power generators: Loy Yang Power, Loy Yang B, Hazelwood and Yallourn.

Quantitative results from the research were presented at the annual conference of the International Association of Business and Society in 2007 (read the paper in our resources section). The results showed that even in an environment where firms face similar constraints, individual firms can differentiate themselves in corporate social responsiveness capabilities, and gain the advantage of “soft” business benefits such as more opportunities for collective learning and innovation in the workplace.

ACCSR thanks the participating companies for their thoughtful contributions and the allocation of staff time to participate in interviews. An industry research report will released in late 2007.

Leeora also published a paper in the Journal of Corporate Citizenship in 2006, presented research papers at the Engaging Communities Conference in 2005 and at the International Association for Business and Society (IABS) in 2007, and spoke at more than a dozen industry seminars and conferences during the reporting period.