Hi, Catalina.

If you consider Malcolm Baldrige approach, there are at least threespecific CSR factors: ethics & legal, enviroment and community. Ethics & Legal includes all stakeholders, such as suppliers, owners (shareholders), customers, people and other externals (Government, neighbors/community...). For better guidance, you can consider of course GRI and ISO 26000 too.

If you are looking for KPIs, I think it depends on organization, business and strategy, but if you need so, please let me know and I will give you some proposals.

Best rgards,

--

Aldo Caprile.

Dear Catalina Crisan-Mitra 

Greetings,

I think it is related of any item or variable related to society service , some firms participate as percentage of net profit  and present to society  to build hospitals , schools ...... etc  , also mean treatment of customer as transparency  .

Best Regards, 

As mentioned by others, the GRI, ISO26000 as well as the SA8000 framework are all credible. Nevertheless, I have found the CSR Best Practice Principles for TWSE/GTSM-Listed Companies (commonly known as the TW Principles) to be most useful for evaluating and comparing the CSR performance.

Thank you for recommendations!

 For Aldo

I am making a survey on large Companies that operate on Romanian market to see CSR particularities. It would be useful to see what your KPI recommendations are.

My Ph.D student completed her thesis and graduated last year. Her topic was Ethics and CSR in relation to Government Link Companies (GLC) in Malaysia. The stakeholders defined are according to the needs of the specific terms of reference.

However in general sense the constituents-stakeholders such community, environment, customers etc must be the usual factors/indicators to be considered.

 Dear Catalina, 

Social Return on Investment is a method to measure economic value of non economic investments, But it is more to make a valuation of CSR projects than evaluate them.

Best regards 

Igor P.

Catalina:

SA 8000 Performance Indicator Annex as a matter of fact provides a lot of interesting indicators. You can find them in this link:

http://www.sa-intl.org/_data/n_0001/resources/live/Performance%20Indicator%20Annex_11_17_2014.pdf

However, the SA 8000 indicators are excesively specific and sometimes not massively measurable, because they are audit-driven, not performance-driven.

There is a list of possible KPIs of your interest according to categories metioned before:

Ethics & Legal:

- Penalty fees (may be clasified by areas, i. e. tax or labour judgement)

- # of lost court rulings (related to mentioned areas)

- # of lawsuits received

- % compliance of labour, tax and specific audit or inspection (i. e., # of audit findings)

- % of workers earning wages over ethic salary (defined by U.N.O.); wages average; difference between executives wages and lowest (or average) rewarded worker

- % of late payments to suppliers (you could take i. e. only SMB vendors, if you like)

- # of complaints of any stakeholder related to ethic matters (i. e.complains of  vendors, workers or customers on any offcial or independent body site, such as customer rights defense organzations)

- Customer/Community/Vendor Perception o Satisfaction Index on ethics or transparency matters (frequently used on banking industry and retail)

- % Availability of an specific kind of information (i. e. how much service condittions info is published on website, or how many times call centers answers about info requested by customers)

- # of severe work accidents

- Tax contribution over profit

- # of complaints of unfair practices (i. e. a competitor complains about dumping)

Enviroment

- Water/Carbon footprint index

- Unit/Kg/Tons of paper (or other materials) recycling per worker

- Liquid waste (or other) emissions

- Penalty fees/lawsuits/lost court rulings related to enviroment

Community

- % of profit invested on community development

- # complaints of community members (i. e. to an offcial institution)

- Communty perception index

- # of community people employed by company

- % of fulfillment of community development plan

Besta regards,

--

Aldo Caprile.

Just a critical comment regarding CSR.

Since CSR is not a standard (as defined by IFRS; IASs and ISAs), the fact that a company does not publish disclosures regarding CSR does not necessarily imply that there is not fully or partially CSR considered (for example in terms of social  or economical aspects). CSR disclosures are voluntarly for entrpreises in Europe and are cost and time consuming. SMEs may apply for example an environmental aspect since SMEs tend not to have enough resources (human factor or economical-timing) to write further notes. 

CSR are normally published by big companies because they have resources to do so, but again some information may not be disclosure deep enough.

I would also highlight another aspect of CSR commonly forgotten (it may potentially recent) that it is the institutional one. This is specific regulatory framework applied to some companies due to be performing in very specialised sectors that may be regulated (energy) or sectors that affect the social welfare in specific countries (connectivity in terms of airports such as in Norway, etc.) that may imply tailored standards or sections of them and it is essential to reflect this as part of CSR.  

I wish this helps, Ane

Dear, the basic evaluating factor could be linked to their actual involvement for instance, a reflection in their activities especially with Accor Hotels where they are involved in trees planting. This is a clear valuation point. The installation of recycling plant to support against carbon and their participation in their environmental issues, could give and be an indicator. Thanks 

My suggestion is the need for a theoretical framework for addressing the issue.  As a finance person I would frame the research question to fit within a risk – return modelling and use Stakeholder theory (expanded shareholder framework) as the starting point.  From this positioning I can enquire about the obvious – impact on equity returns, signalling theory and communicating about CSR from the firm and even test whether CSR lowers agency costs through an additional component of monitoring.

There are obvious issues about inputs – money spent, compliance with regulatory requirements etc.  On the outcome side the metrics are more difficult.  Take tree planting as an example.  Who owns the trees and who trades the carbon credits – while not trying to be too cynical?  The sustainable social and development change from CSR is much more difficult to measure than the number of metres of drainage dug and hopefully maintained.  My suggestion in this space is to think of metrics relating to morbidity, education, health, income and ask what changes have occurred.  If there is no data then this certainly says something in a signalling theory context.

Enjoy the study; it should be great.  I would put in a plug for my book on CSR and the oil industry but think it is not really relevant to your topic.

Clarkson, M. E. (1995). A stakeholder framework for analyzing and evaluating corporate social performance. Academy of management review, 20(1), 92-117.

Carroll, A. B. (1979). A three-dimensional conceptual model of corporate performance. Academy of management review, 4(4), 497-505.

Tsoutsoura, M. (2004). Corporate social responsibility and financial performance. center for responsible business.

Dear Catalina

you may get some benefits from ISO 26000 regarding the CSR.

also articles about Accounting for CRS

Regards

Catalina, I hope this note finds you well.

The answer to this question will depend upon the company you are thinking of (internal CSR standards), the industry (industry CSR standards), or nationality (different nations adhere to particular CSR standards). The only "established" global standard on Social Responsibility as Mawih notes above is ISO 26000.

I've attached a few recommendations.  Hope that this helps!

Article Standardizing Social Responsibility? New Perspectives on Gui...

Article Classification of CSR standards in the light of ISO 26000

Article Perceived voluntary code legitimacy: Towards a theoretical f...

Article Antecedents of Settlement on a New Institutional Practice: N...

Article The fit of the social responsibility standard ISO 26000 with...

Dear Catalina,

That depends very much on what you want to use the CSR data for.

But if you are to establish a generic set of data for research, may I refer you to my book on this topic, where I look into what minimum requirements of reporting that should exist for CSR reporting, incl a suggestion for a generic minimum indicator-set that works for all companies regardless of which business they are within. If all at least provided these data, then the CSR reporting can be used by analysts and investors. The book also shows how you can work on making analysis on larger CSR datasets from many companies. 

See here: https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138015845

Do not hesitate of reverting, if you have further questions.

Brgds

Jane

If you're evaluating various dimensions then a good strategy would be to base your study on ISO standards. Likewise, another way to evaluate CSR performance of  various companies is to compare their financial spending on CSR activities. You can easily find money spent on CSR activities in the financial statements of various companies. Since, these statements are audited and consolidated as well so a mean comparison of these financial spending on CSR activities can also help you decide which company spends more then the other. Talking about CSR is easy but spending money on it is difficult :)

Best of luck to you:)