We listened in on an interesting webinar today and wanted to share some quick thoughts while they were fresh in our minds.
CR Magazine and NYSE Euronext fielded a second annual corporate responsibility best practices study, sending surveys to every publicly traded company on the NYSE Euronext indexes as well as the CR Magazine database. President of SharedXpertise, Richard Crespin, and Research Director of SharedXpertise, Elizabeth Boudrie, presented some high level results earlier today that provided some insights into how:
- Corporate responsibility leaders are structuring, staffing, and funding their programs
- CEOs and boards are engaging in corporate responsibility
- Corporate responsibility is impacting profitability and competitive advantage
We found it especially interesting that CEO valuation of corporate responsibility is rising with 86% of respondents saying their CEOs believe corporate responsibility is important versus 81% in the 2010 study. CEOs are also increasingly more likely to have driven a corporate responsibility-related initiative, this year’s findings show that this is up from 51% in 2010 to 66% in 2011. Even more interesting is that this increase isn’t company size specific, and holds true across nearly all company sizes.
A few more quick hits that were shared today:
- Both the percentage of companies that have formal programs and the percentage of companies that have lead corporate responsibility roles are up between 2010 and 2011. A higher percentage also has dedicated corporate responsibility budgets in 2011 versus 2010.
- Although the proportion of companies that have formal corporate responsibility programs and dedicated corporate responsibility budgets are growing, the gap between those companies that have formal programs but no budgets remained essentially unchanged year-over-year.
- Most companies expect to expand their corporate responsibility programs over the next three years – many of the smallest are almost as likely as the largest to do so largest.
- While companies generally believe they have integrated corporate responsibility into the overall business strategy, still more than a third either are neutral or disagree that corporate responsibility is integrated into overall strategy.
Be sure to follow the study on CR Magazine and NYSE Euronext Reports pages to download the complete report when it is available in the coming months. The results of this year’s survey will be published in CR Magazine as well as presented in a variety of events through the remainder of the year, including the Commit!Forum 2011.