CSR &HRM

1. CSR &HRM HR’s valuable role which exists across the entire business life cycle. Organizations of different sizes, whether small, medium or large, cannot survive without the effective management of HR. However, the degree of HR involvement and partnership in the decision-making process varies among companies.

2. Recent Trends • There is emerging evidence that effectively implemented, CSR can have significant impact in motivating, developing and retaining staff. • Novo Nordisk, a high-value CSR pharmaceutical company in Denmark, for example, after launching their Values in Action program, which aligns their business objectives with sustainable development principles, saw a 5% drop in staff turnover, while Sears found a 20% reduction in staff turnover since implementing their CSR program. (Skinner, 2002, p.1). • A landmark international CSR study of human resource practitioners conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) in 2006, reveals that CSR practices are seen as important to employee morale (50%), loyalty (41%), retention (29%), recruitment of top employees (25%) and productivity (12%). [Note that percentages reflect Canadian responses] (SHRM, 2007, p. 27).

3. Recent Trends • Globally, HR leaders are developing and implementing incentive and appraisal systems that reflect sustainability as well as hiring personnel that embody these values. For example, research by The Conference Board reveals that 50% of global managers report their companies do, or plan to, include corporate citizenship (aka CSR) as a performance evaluation category. Additionally, 68% of respondents cite the link between corporate citizenship and performance appraisal as “increasingly important.” (Lockwood, 2004). • The report, Developing the Global Leader of Tomorrow, observed that “a range of human resource levers are important for developing [CSR] organizational capabilities: building these knowledge and skills through leadership development programs, career development planning, succession planning, performance management and incentive systems and competency frameworks, and seeking these knowledge and skills when recruiting new talent into the organization”. (Ashridge, 2008, p. 10).

4. Recent Trends • Julia Moulden, in her book “We are the New Radicals: A Manifesto for Reinventing Yourself and Saving the World”, points to two landmark studies of the boomer generation: 75% of this group want to keep working and of that number 60% want to do make a positive difference. According to her math, in the North American context, 30 million employees want to make a difference in the world. • Shareholders around the world are pressuring companies to link executive compensation packages to the company’s sustainability performance, motivated in part by the prevalence of short-term and stock market-linked metrics in many executive compensation schemes . • Active shareholders believe that compensation packages based primarily on achievement of short-term financial targets have the potential to deter companies from undertaking those activities that create sustainable longer term value.

5. ETHICS IN RECRUITMENT AND SELECTION. • Introduction: • Ethics are the principles or standards that guide day-to-day business activities in accordance with established corporate values. Ethical business conduct offers a wide range of organizational integrity, involving strategy, business goals, policies and activities. Among ethical values are trust, respect, honesty, responsibility and the overall pursuit of perfection. • RECRUITMENT: refers to the processes followed by organisations when they wish to attract applicants for vacant or new positions. • SELECTION: follows the recruiting process with the appointment of the most suited applicant to the position. • Ethics in the field of hiring,staffing and recruitment is based on a combination of things and depends on who is actually involved in the hiring process. Certainly the job searcher, hiring manager and recruiter are just three possible people involved in a hiring decision.

6. Code of ethics for employers • Treat all jobseekers equally • No discrimination based on race, origin, religious or political views, gender, age or sexual orientation Do not request Jobseekers to include their photos in the resume • Rely only on relevant and job-related information when making hiring decisions

7. Utility approach aginst discrimination • The standard utilitarian argument against racial and sexual discrimination is based on the idea that a society’s productivity will be optimized to the extent that jobs are awarded on the basis of competency. • Different jobs require different skills and personality traits if they are to be carried out in as productive manner as possible. Furthermore, different people have different skills and personality traits. Consequently, to ensure that jobs are maximally productive, they must be assigned to those individuals whose skills and personality traits qualify them as the most competent for the job. • If jobs are assigned to individuals on basis of other criteria unrelated to competency, productivity must necessarily decline. Discriminating among job applicants on the basis of race, sex, religion, or other characteristics unrelated to job performance is necessarily inefficient and, therefore , contrary to utilitarian principles.

8. Nonutilitarian approach aginst discrimination • Nonutilitarian arguments against racial and sexual discrimination may take the approach that discrimination is wrong because it violates a person’s basic moral rights. • Kantian theory for example, holds that human beings should be treated as ends and never as means. At a minimum, this principle means that each individual has moral right to be treated as a free person equal to any other person and that all individuals have a correlative moral duty to treat each individual as a free and equal person. • Discriminatory practices violate the principle in two ways. First, discrimination is based on the belief that one group is inferior to the other groups, that blacks, for example, are less competent or worthy of respect than men. Racial and sexual discrimination, for instance, may be based on stereotypes that see minorities as “lazy or “shitless” and see women as “emotional” and “week” such degrading stereotypes undermine the self esteem of those groups against whom stereotypes are directed and thereby violate their right to be treated as equals. Second discrimination places the member of group that are discriminated against in lower social and economic position: women and minorities have fewer job opportunities and are given lower salaries. Again, the right to be treated as a free job and equal person is violated.

9. Justice approach aginst discrimination • This arguments against discrimination view it is as a violation of the principle of justice. “Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.

10. Discriminatory practices • Placing misleading advertisements for jobs. • Misrepresenting the requirements of a particular position. • Not reviewing candidates based on their merits. • Discourage women and people from minority backgrounds. • Referral system • Unequal compensation(s)

11. Screening practice • Job qualification are discriminatory when they are not relevant to the job to be performed.Aptitude or intelligence tests used to screen applicants become discriminatory when they serve to disqualify members from minority culture who are unfamiliar with the language, concepts, and social situations used in the tests but who are in fact fully qualified for the job. • Job interviews are discriminatory if the interviewer routinely disqualifies women and minorities by relying on sexual or racial stereotypes. • These stereotypes may include assumptions about the sort of occupations “proper” for women, the sort of work and time burdens that may fittingly be “imposed’ on women, the ability of women or minority person to maintain “commitment” to job, the propriety of putting women in “male” environments, the assumed effects women or minorities would have on employee morale or on customers, and the extent to which women or minorities are assumed to have personality and aptitude traits that make them unsuitable for a job. Such generalizations about women or minorities are not only discriminatory, they are also false.

12. Sexual Harassment • Women, are victims of a particularly troublesome kind of discrimination . They are subjected to sexual harassment. Although males are also frequent victims. For all acknowledge frequency, sexual harassment still remains difficult to define and to police and prevent. • Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors and other verbal or physical contacts os sexual nature constitue sexual harassment • when submission to such individuals made either explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of an individuals employement,(submission to or rejection of such conduct by an individual is used as the basis for employement decision affecting such individual. • such conduct has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual’s work performance or creating an intimidating, hostile or offensive working environment.