Corporate social responsibility is no longer just a buzzphrase within tech circles. By embracing social responsibility, tech companies can ensure positive social and environmental effects associated with how their businesses operate.
Recent data shows that 85% of consumers have a more favorable image of an organization or product when it supports a cause that they care about. In comparison, another 72% believe that companies should be legally responsible to humanity and the Earth. However, you might wonder how tech companies fit in this picture of corporate social responsibility.
This is understandable. After all, when you get into the nitty-gritty, business and technology contributes to the climate crisis. However, it is increasingly part of the solution. For instance, the components of high-tech can actively reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In short, the crucial question of the future is about how we should use tech for corporate social responsibility.
As technological advancements become increasingly ingrained into every component of people’s lives, companies must embed governance and social principles to help the world.
How to improve corporate social responsibility
This article digs deep into how companies use corporate social responsibility technology to address social and environmental issues through green projects and philanthropy.
Create a comprehensive corporate social responsibility program
Before addressing social and environmental issues through philanthropy and green projects, organizations must initially put their values into practice. This means embodying and embracing environmental, social and governance (ESG) components throughout their operations.
So, how can corporations start doing this? Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all approach, but the first step is to create an effective corporate social responsibility program that ensures that all operations and compliance support sustainability and employee health.
With the global climate issue and several environmental problems in the spotlight of public debate, leading tech companies must incorporate social and environmental strategies into every facet of distribution and manufacturing.
In short, they must put as much money into carbon neutrality as they do into advancement. By minimizing their carbon footprint at every product development phase, they can significantly contribute to sustainability, create products with sustainable value for society, and solve processing issues.
Now that everything has been laid out, you might be wondering how to create an effective CSR program. A rule of thumb is to define CSR. Think about what impact you want your tech company to have and consider your actions based on its effect on people, the planet and profit.
Once you’ve set out your goals and objectives, you must establish your baseline and long-term vision for corporate social responsibility. This means exploring opportunities relevant to your mission and creating metrics to measure your program’s impact. Depending on the program, you can establish metrics and key performance indicators.
Invest in social and environmental initiatives
As an alternative to the previous point, companies can address social and environmental issues by personally being involved. This can be through educating their audiences on the subject and how they can help, holding events in honor of the cause, or establishing an in-house corporate social responsibility and philanthropy mission.
Encourage a social responsibility team to find ways that your technology company can give back to the community. You can also partner with other companies to make environmental and economic changes. The point is here to be environmentally conscious of addressing specific challenges.
Although the charitable sector depends on donations, there are many different, less-considered ways to actively support it. A good example is skill-based volunteering.
For example, you can use social data technology to address common challenges within environmental and social circles, such as waste pollution and management. When done well, dedicating some of your resources to charitable causes can generate meaningful social impact and build even more public trust and goodwill.
Train your employees in corporate social responsibility
An age-old adage goes that employees can be your biggest weapon or your most significant weakness. The same applies to organizations wanting to address social and environmental issues through green projects and philanthropy. Like it or not, higher standards for corporate social responsibility efforts are not going away anytime soon, and nor should they.
Companies must refrain from resorting to slogans and one-off publicity stunts to meet the increasing expectations to create social change. Instead, they must invest in their personnel to live their values, find and build partnerships, and support their social and environmental initiative.
One way of doing this is to brush up on your employee skills by letting them study a master’s in data science at Baylor University. In doing so, they can acquire skills to gather, handle and evaluate data types and trends and deliver the results accordingly. With this, they can make a strategic plan for company growth without undermining social and environmental causes.
This is because data science graduates can gain a broad skillset to apply to tech-related careers, such as computer programming, data architecture and data engineering. If this sounds interesting, you might wonder how to get started. Regardless of your chosen academic institution, it would help if your employees had undergraduate degrees in data engineering and computer programming.
While studying a master’s degree program in data science, your employees will develop a comprehensive understanding of data science methods in big data, data visualization, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining and predictive modeling. This will allow them to build the skills to explore, assess, manage and interpret large datasets using the most innovative technological advancements.
Moreover, they will also be applying data science and analytical processes to address data-rich problems from various fields and drive decision-making. At the end of the course, there is also a capstone project that will allow them to apply these skills to real-world problems, such as social and environmental issues in corporate social responsibility.
Conclusion
Changing social and environmental processes can be challenging for anyone, let alone a busy company, but this does not mean that it’s impossible. You can start being an agent of corporate social responsibility change today.
