Tag Archives: corporate social responsibility

Charity & CSR, HRTech, News, Wellbeing

HealthTech 50 Ranked Wellbeing Platform Uncovers Major Challenges Faced by CSR Leaders

WellGiving, a platform designed to improve the health and wellbeing of employees through fitness and fundraising, has uncovered several major challenges faced by CSR leaders according to its recent report.

The research, which included extensive interviews with CSR leaders and teams across multiple corporations, found a common sentiment amongst interviewees – they did not want their roles to be regarded as simply a tick-box exercise, but wanted to see their companies actively living by their brand and corporate values.

Given their responsibility to understand the needs of their communities and demonstrate a positive impact through initiatives such as employee volunteering and community support, WellGiving identified a number of key issues facing CSR leaders in achieving these aims in an initial summary of the report, including:

  • Management and reporting of global CSR initiatives was found to be among one of the top concerns, being both admin-intensive and time-consuming, while failing to produce detailed impact data.
  • Many CSR leaders were faced with apathy and scepticism from employees, with a lack of buy-in from managers, making setting wellbeing goals and maintaining charity partnerships a challenge across departments.
  • Employee engagement as a whole was identified as another major barrier, with a difficulty in aligning staff with new and existing CSR strategies.

These findings follow WellGiving’s HealthTech 50 ranking, highlighting the most innovative start-ups, scale-ups and established technology firms with a focus on original tech for personal and preventative healthcare.

Developers of the WellGiving platform have worked closely with Chief Executives, HR leaders and CSR teams from corporations both large and small to create the platform, and their recent report sheds light on several issues exacerbated by new models of remote and hybrid working across disparate and global teams.

Discussing the research, Paul Rhodes, founder of WellGiving, said: “One of the most telling things about our latest research was, despite the lack of buy-in and the barriers faced by many CSR leaders, they remain extremely passionate about the work they do and the impact they have on employees and their communities. The ultimate goal for CSR leaders is creating social value, and being able to measure the positive impacts their companies create for the economy, society and community.

“With many remote workers being onboarded virtually, and thus not used to office environments, it poses a huge challenge for CSR leaders to create those water-cooler moments and keep staff engaged with CSR initiatives.

“At WellGiving, we understand the need for a hyper-localised approach that allows employees to fundraise for causes that are close to their hearts, thereby driving engagement and boosting the social value and impact of these initiatives, and we are constantly developing new and innovative ways to allow CSR leaders to do just this.”

Following a successful beta stage in 2021, WellGiving launched in January 2022 with the aim of creating a platform that would allow companies to improve the mental and physical wellbeing of their staff through the gamification of physical activity, while also giving businesses the chance to raise funds for charities that were hit hard during the pandemic. The platform is now on track to raise in excess of £1 million for charities across the UK and beyond, while helping corporations meet and exceed their CSR and wellbeing initiatives.

 

For more information, visit: https://wellgiving.co.uk/

Climate, News

Shareholders more likely to support eco-initiatives if they have experienced climate disasters

Shareholders in locations recently hit by climate-related disasters such as hurricanes are far more likely to support environmental proposals, by as much as 38%, even when such proposals risk decreasing firm value, according to new research from the Rotterdam School of Management Erasmus University (RSM).

The study, undertaken by Dr Guosong Xu at RSM alongside Dr Eliezer Fich at Drexel University, sought to bring greater understanding to two key questions at the crux of encouraging corporations to better support environmental protection efforts; whether shareholder beliefs about climate change alter their support for environmental proposals, and whether those proposals affect firm value.

Dr Xu says;

“Climate change related proposals have increased steadily in recent years, reflecting growing investor demand for corporate accountability. However, despite their popularity, these proposals commonly receive insufficient support. According to a report by the UN, just 2.8% received enough votes to pass during stockholder meetings held from 2006 to 2020.

“Our study seeks to better understand why these initiatives receive such little support, and what it takes to pass them successfully.”

The researchers speculate that such a lack of voting support is driven by stockholders’ perception that climate-change is not an immediate concern. Belief, they say, plays an important role in investor behaviour.

The researchers analysed mutual funds’ voting records of US firms according to the Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) Voting Analytics database, between 2006 and 2020. They then mapped each funds headquarters to the Census 2010 county Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) code, to identify hurricane locations.

By doing this, the researchers were able to base their findings on more than 357,000 voting observations made by shareholders of US-based firms.

Dr Xu and Dr Fich made several key discoveries.

Firstly, funds in areas hit by a hurricane were significantly more likely to vote for an environmental proposal in the immediate aftermath of the event, as were funds located in other hurricane-prone locations. The difference in investor support was as much as 38% higher in such locations.

However, the effect was, for many, temporary, with most investors returning to their previous stances and reversing their support for such schemes within three years.

Notably, the researchers say that fund characteristics such as size, performance, flows, attitudes towards environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) issues had little impact on their research findings. Those instances where unconditional support was found for climate proposals did not differ among funds located either inside or outside of hurricane-prone locations in the years without a hurricane strike.

Therefore, shareholders’ changed perceptions about climate risks were the most likely reason for their increased support for pro-environmental initiatives after a hurricane strike.

Lastly, once climate-related proposals were passed, firm performance typically weakens. In analysing whether ESG-related proposals created value for firms, the researchers discovered that companies that approved environmental proposals also typically exhibited lower long-term stock returns and accounting underperformance.

The researchers say their work adds important information to the ongoing debate on the role of corporations in global environmental protection, by highlighting the role of investor psychology in altering shareholders’ perceptions about climate risks and, consequently, their support for corporate environmental policies.