Corporate social responsibility concepts and implementation

Business

Corporate Social Responsibility

Rapid changes are happening within society and therefore also in the environment within which organizations do business. These changes often present challenges that necessitate early solutions if an organization to be triumphant. The environment of an organization is made up of the conditions, circumstances, and influences that affect the firm's ability to attain its objectives. Every organization exists in an environment that has both external and internal workings. The external and the in-ternal environment are composed of five elements: physical, technological, social, political, and economic (HRM Environment, 2010).

An example of a way that an organization changed due to a technological trend in the external environment can be seen in the recent announcement that was made by Proctor & Gamble. Employees at Procter & Gamble will soon be able to print e-mails, presentations and other business papers directly from their smartphones, due to a partnership with printer vendor Xerox. P&G has revealed Xerox's new mobile print solution as part of its Enterprise Print Services (EPS) strategy. The company has said that through EPS, they can simplify and digitize its global printing infrastructure by consolidating devices and controlling how and when documents are printed (Eddy, 2010).

By using any smartphone device, employees can send documents to a secure server or cloud. Documents are held in the cloud until the employee walks up to any printer in the network and enters a code to discharge the prints. This mobile print solution is the first outcome of the Xerox and P&G Innovation Council that was fashioned in order to explore future work and technology trends and to design solutions that will benefit the P&G business. Mobile print supports P&G's Give Back 500 Million Minutes program by reducing time employees spend on print and output-related issues (Eddy, 2010).

An example of a social element that changed due to a trend in the internal environment can be in Coca Cola's recognition and use of social media as a marketing tool. Several years ago Coke realized that Coke.com was not their home page instead it was Google.com, digg.com and YouTube. It is important for corporations to take the time to keep up on what is showing up in the new social sites and search engines. New ideas that have arisen out of social media include: 1. Fish where the fish are. Don't build new communities and micro sites. Go where the people already are and 2. Keep fans most important. Coke has developed a social media strategy that revolves around 4Rs:

1. Review -- listen to what's being said

2. Respond -- what to respond to and who should respond.

3. Record -- create more convincing video content. It has been found that people are 7 -- 10 times more likely to click on a video than text.

4. Redirect. Search and SEO are very important. Make sure the right content is found when people search. User generated content is getting more search attention.