Corporate social responsability

Define best CSR practice in your sector:

CSR is a now even more integrated in business model. It ensures a way of production respectful of the environment, the employees and all the stakeholders. Choosing the corporate social responsibility implies many engagements to held for all stakeholders. It stimulates socially responsible behaviour of the businesses. In our field, the decoration sector, CSR have many ways to occur.

The production has to be eco-friendly. It could first appear paradoxical to support the environment in the decoration field. Indeed, decoration can be seen as useless: its production is a mess that pollute for no actual value creation. However, we reject this pessimist vision. We believe that eco-friendly decoration does exist. The choice in material constructions is crucial. Companies use biodegradable materials or can propose to recycle outdated products. For instance, Ecolo Design, a French company, proposes many ways to create its own decoration without polluting at all. It is able to create furniture based on cardboard! It is thus possible to product eco-friendly in a simple and fun way. Decoration and environment respect are no longer opposed.

Another practice that implies eco-friendly production is the gain of a label here are many labels, created by UNO, the EU, etc… and that certified the respect of the environment. They are hard to obtain but ensure to consumers the sincerity of the supply.

As far as employees are concerned, decoration field works as any other. To ensure their well-being, firms can provide a huge transparency on the way they hire and treat their labour. Consider them is essential for a company. Indeed, the more they love their company, better is their efficiency. Therefore, Google works a lot on the work-conditions in its firms. And it’s not chance if it’s one of the most efficient company!

Employees are not the only stakeholders in a production. The company must also respect suppliers  and clients.

Finally, a CSR practice would be to reinvest benefits in ONG or non-profitable organisations. CSR is indeed more focused on the way of earning money and less on the way to spend it, but we see that both are linked. Do-gooding can be seen as part of the production. Some decorations firms donate to environmental organisations to provide recycling.

Define worst CSR practice in your sector:

As we already said, CSR has a complex and multitier definition. So the worst practice could be the one that isn’t in compliance with any criteria (social, environmental, do-gooding in the society at large, …). But it is often harsh to combine all these factors so a bad CSR practice would be one that doesn’t abide by one criteria.

For instance, in our decoration sector the worst CSR practice would be to manufacture a product that is not environment friendly – made in non-renewable materials that pollute a lot and the object would consume a lot of energy and battery. The planned obsolescence would help the company to sell more products at the expense of the environment. This production would have been delegated to a cheaper sweatshop that not only doesn’t foster the social progress but strengthen economic inequalities. The wages of the French employees would be paltry and unfair between men and women.

Moreover, we think that pretending to act in compliance with CSR may be worse than bad practice. For instance, the company Enron used to give a lot to Houston good causes. But it’s even the opposite of a good CSR practice to the extent that it is like an investment in good causes to buy a good reputation.

Besides, we must emphasize on the fact that corporate social responsibility isn't about how a company spends its money, it's about how it earns it. That’s why Enron’s donation to Houston good causes can’t be considered a CSR practice.

Ikea is a case in point in order to illustrate bad CSR practice. Actually, according to Ikea’s website, the company is trying to reach sustainable goals for all the stakeholders and every people in touch with them through the People & Planet Positive project, that is a Sustainable Strategy for 2020. That’s exactly what we mentioned as the CSR’s definition. They state for instance that the wood and the cotton they use are more sustainable than the applicable standards. Half of the high-qualified staff is said to be women. As for the environment, the IKEA foundation took a 1-billion-euro pledge.

However, in 2012 the Swedish company was sued in France for a long-term scandal. From 2003, the firm was spying on syndicalists, customers or even employees (more than 400 future employees according to the clues). The firm used to pay private detectives in order to investigate on the past of the persons. These latter were scanning data bases, that were only legal for the police. An employee testified of one of the major scandal: as she was sick, the decided to leave the country to regain strength with the agreement of a physician. However, Ikea thought that it was a scheme in order to take advantage of the sick leaves. So they decided to hire a detective to figure out the trickery and to have proofs of it. Even though they haven’t found anything suspicious, they decided to sack her. Outraged by this decision, she brought an action against Ikea and won the case with the court decision of unfair dismissal. After the discovery, 50 employees turned into civil parties; the main managers aware of this practice were interrogated and some fired.

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