ESG and CSR are taking their toll on the workplace

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THE BIG PICTURE

SURVEY SAYS — CEOs are reeling from the political whiplash around environmental, social and governance principles. Turns out employees are buckling under the weight of companies’ corporate social impact work, too, according to a new survey.

Eighty-six percent of respondents in a survey released last week by the Association of Corporate Citizenship Professionals and YourCause from Blackbaud said that their CSI teams’ level of responsibility had grown over the past year. As a result, 61 percent of respondents said their teams were working longer hours and half of respondents said their teams were suffering from burnout.

Smaller percentages of respondents reported issues like mental health concerns, low morale and employee turnover. But two-thirds of respondents said they wanted more headcount, 54 percent said they wanted more financial resources, and 46 percent said they wanted more buy-in from executives.

Employers need to heed the warnings, the survey said.

“Company executives, sometimes not as well-versed in the specifics of CSR and ESG work, must understand these consequences, particularly in a tight labor market,” it said.

The survey also found ambivalence up in the C-suite. More than half of the 149 companies surveyed said their executives were highly committed to CSR, but only 33 percent said they thought their executives had a high understanding of the field.


Intriguingly, 44 percent of respondents thought their executives were highly committed to ESG, and slightly less — 39% — thought executives understood the concept well.

“The ongoing political backlash against ESG may have influenced these results,” the report noted.

While less than half of respondents said their companies were highly committed to ESG, environmental sustainability was the most popular corporate social priority, followed by K-12 education and food insecurity. The report said companies are “potentially influenced by new EU regulations around ESG.”

Other issues like climate justice and Covid-19 ranked much lower when survey respondents were asked about their companies’ social priority areas, coming in at 16 percent and 4 percent, respectively.

What’s in a name? The terminology around corporate social work is shifting, the study found.

No one term received a majority of votes, but “corporate social responsibility” got the plurality, with 21 percent. Among tech companies, “social impact” won out with 42 percent. And while ESG is grabbing headlines, CSR is still the corporate leader: nearly 20 percent of respondents said their companies have CSR functions but no ESG functions, while only 4 percent reported the reverse.

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