It helps you attract and keep the best employees .........................
Today corporations compete for the best workforce. Many people, especially
those from younger generations, want more than just a high salary; they also
want to feelgood about their company. They want to work for an enterprise
that makes meaningful contributions to the world. Your cafeteria food may
be great, but if the news is full of reports about your company causing birth
defects in the Third World, your employees are not going to have warm feel-
ings about their employers.
Companies have become social institutions in their own right and they are
accountable to their own employees. CSR shows the world you want to be a
good global citizen and this helps recruitment and employee satisfaction,
and lessens absenteeism and turnover.
CSR is ethical ......................................................................................
Business leaders are just like the rest of us: They have moral values. In the
KPMG International Survey of Corporate Responsibility Reporting, ethical
considerations were cited by 53 percent of executives cited ethical considera-
tions as the number two factor behind their sustainability initiatives, second
only to economic considerations.
Take the example of Novo Nordisk. Like many western companies, it does
business in China. But it also has taken on a pressing health problem — even
though it may limit future growth. In China, diabetes is growing at a faster
rate than the rest of the world due to the transition to a Western diet and
lifestyle. Novo Nordisk has 60 percent of the Chinese market for insulin. If
they succeed in reducing the effects of diabetes through education, presum-
ably sales of insulin will not increase at the current rate. Yet the company
believes that it’s better to do the right thing rather than just seek profits. To
that end, they’re investing considerable effort into diabetes education, both
for the public and for healthcare professionals.
It helps business planning and innovation .....................................
Sustainability reporting does more than assuage external stakeholders; it’s
also a management tool. It opens new windows into your operations. Imagine
that your company wants to expand overseas production and is considering
whether to invest in a factory in India and another in China. Sustainability
reporting gives you an auditable database with benchmarks for examining
256 Part IV: Managing the Flow of Information
