As I see it, there are several ways in which HR departments in a number of organisations are already engaging with the CSR agenda.

HR is almost always behind all the activities which add up to being a great place to work for example: work life balance and flexible working, supporting working from home, promoting diversity and ensuring equal opportunities and employability etc.

Then HR departments are often responsible for organising volunteering programmes and increasingly are getting involved in green travel plans, car sharing and other green benefits schemes as climate change has become a more important issue.

But there is a much more strategic contribution HR has to make. What lies behind the CSR agenda is a range of important social and environmental trends that are changing the business environment. The risks and opportunities arising from climate change should be high on this list for many organisations but there are other important trends too, like scarcity of natural resources and increasing cost of inputs, doing business in countries with poor public infrastructure and governance, increasing legislation and regulation, increasing influence of civil society organisations on public opinion and public policy. The list goes on.

All these trends present both risks and opportunities for organisations, and so organisations need to position themselves to ensure they are able to respond effectively.

Climate change

This is partly about getting started on initiatives that get called CSR, but it’s also about more strategic considerations too. In the case of climate change for example – what are the implications for your business if carbon pricing legislation is introduced? Should you be selling carbon-heavy assets now while you have the chance? Are there new business opportunities you need to be exploiting?

Risk management

The implication of all this for HR is that part of the organisational response to these trends needs to be to make sure that senior leaders in the organisation have the right knowledge and skills to be able to make effective decisions and respond to the risks and opportunities. In case you’re thinking that the credit crunch is making it particularly hard to make time for CSR at the moment, remember that the reason we have the credit crunch is because of a spectacular failure of risk management!

Here at Ashridge we’re partnering with he European Academy of Business in Society, the UN Global Compact and a consortium of the world’s leading business schools to understand corporate perspectives on what kinds of knowledge and skills senior executives require to respond to these new risks and opportunities, and how these knowledge and skills might be developed. The findings from this research will be launched at the UN in December this year.

HR building blocks

HR has a key role to play in building the right kinds of knowledge, skills and mindsets through levers such as recruitment, leadership development programmes and succession planning, competency frameworks, performance measurement and incentive systems, and change programmes.

The HR teams in a number of organisations have already begun to act on this and the research we’re publishing this winter will feature a number of examples from different companies globally.