Do we need CSR officers?

They are the newest breed of senior executive, but what are CSR officers actually for?

One of the primary concerns for any business keen to limit its environmental impact is deciding what management structures to employ to best drive its green strategy.

The conventional approach has been to launch or expand a specific Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) or Sustainability department with direct responsibility for developing and managing green strategies and instigating more sustainable business models.

But while this approach has raised the profile of CSR officers and led to the creation of a raft of new corporate roles ranging from climate change manager to carbon management consultant, some experts are unconvinced it represents the best managerial model for a truly green business and argue that it may even hamper environmental initiatives.

"For me [the CSR function] gets in the way," says Peter Klein, vice president for Europe at CarbonView, a provider of software for measuring carbon emissions across firms' supply chains. "It is because of the role's perceived lack of authority… what we often see when we sit down with a company to look at their carbon strategy is that the CSR department is not strong enough and as a result the different business units end up arguing."

Critics argue that setting up a CSR or sustainability department creates the impression that firms are taking environmental concerns seriously, but in commonly failing to give the department authority over other executives, firms often struggle to drive through genuine changes.

Seb Beloe, vice president for research and advocacy at environmental consultancy SustainAbility, believes this lack of authority is a common problem.

"CSR is generally a bolt-on, almost by definition," he argues. "At best it is seen as a risk management or reporting exercise and integration with the rest of the business can be pretty limited."

He adds that in some businesses the CSR department's influence is so limited that environmental campaigners and NGOs are rejecting them as a point of contact, and are instead trying to directly access more senior executives.

"The more sophisticated [NGOs] are not really interested in talking to the CSR officer as they know they do not make the decisions," he explains.

One commentator goes further still, likening CSR to the much-derided HR department.

"I don't want to say they're totally useless, but they can’t do much," he says.

According to Klein, firms keen to drive successful environmental initiatives must either empower the CSR function with board-level authority or, better still, scrap it all together.

"Ideally it is better to drive environmental initiatives into the rest of the business," he observes. "As long as they have environmental targets and are measured against those, you can make responsibility for the environment part of the business exec's function."

However, while many commentators broadly agree that green best practices should ideally be the responsibility of every corporate exec in an organisation, they also maintain that the CSR function still has a major role to play in attaining that goal.

Duncan Scott of property consultants DTZ, which provides a wide range of green property services and increasingly works with CSR officers, agrees that the CSR department will remain a critical component of firms' environmental strategies for years to come.

"Green business models will become part of the way everyone thinks, but it needs an impetus in the near term to get everyone in the business on board and the CSR department can provide that," he argues. "In the long term the role will be normalised but at the moment having someone in the organisation with this role is really important."

Others argue that there have been instances where firms have disbanded or downgraded their CSR department, arguing that green initiatives have simply become a normal part of the business only to see environmental progress stall without a dedicated team to promote new green strategies.

But if the CSR role is here to stay for the foreseeable future, what can be done to ensure that it delivers results and avoids the common pitfall of becoming little more than an extension to the PR department?

Experts agree that the secret to success lies in close co-operation between the CSR department and the other business units.

"For big businesses it is important to have a CSR Officer as a point person who can work with external stakeholders on sustainability initiatives, but the best CSR departments will realise they have to have an internal as well as external facing role," says Beloe. "They understand they need to be integrated into the business and seen as more of a business development function."

Scott argues that far from being useless, a successful HR department capable of defining corporate strategies and then supporting the rest of the business as it executes those strategies can provide a good example of an integrated management model that CSR officers should aim to emulate.

"You can take flexible working as an example," he argues. "Is it the responsibility of HR or the overall corporate culture to promote it? The answer is it starts with one and leads into the other. Much the same should happen with CSR and the environment."

To achieve this level of integration with the business, CSR departments need to primarily define themselves as internal-facing operations dedicated to supporting other departments. Beloe points to Nike's CSR function as an interesting example of this strategy in action, where "the CSR team sees itself as coaches or internal consultants focused on assisting the rest of the business ".

Similarly, retailer Marks & Spencer has structured its CSR department to combine both internal and external facing responsibilities with a director of CSR and communications in charge of strategy and external relations and head of CSR focusing on supporting the business units.

However, as Klein argues, attaining this level of integration with the business is only possible if the CSR department has real authority and other divisions are obliged to co-operate.

A spokeswoman for M&S argues that the company has recognised this fact and consequently its dedicated CSR committee is chaired by chief executive Stuart Rose.

"He has a view on the bottom line but also on the CSR performance, " she explains. "It ensures CSR is integrated into the business and people with commercial responsibilities also have clear CSR responsibilities."

However, even where firms maximise the effectiveness of their CSR department, experts are widely agreed that it should only ever aspire to be a transitional function focused on ultimately passing environmental responsibilities onto traditional business units.

As Beloe comments: "The best CSR officers say that their role is to work themselves out of a job."