Who is the (your) top company for CSR?

When people find out I am involved in a site that tracks Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) ratings, their first question is generally, “Who is the top company in CSR?”  When I answer, “Which company ranks highest depends on your perspective,” they generally roll their eyes and decide that I am “weaseling out.”

However, I believe that CSR and sustainability measurement cannot be done without an understanding of the bias of the person who is doing the measurement.  People talk a lot about “transparency,” as it applies to companies telling us about their behavior.  I believe we need just as much transparency about our personal standards and viewpoint.

To give an example, a user who has a strong bias towards environmental performance (good climate change behavior, low resource management, good reporting and tracking, etc.) could have these five top companies:

(To see this type of list, go to our site and select the “Eco-oriented default” profile in the “Switch to a different profile” pull down menu.  Then do a geography = North America + USA search.)

If instead you value most how a company performed on community issues (e.g., supply chain issues, product safety and quality, philanthropy and community development) your top five would look like this:

(For this perspective, switch to the Community-default profile.  All your search settings should be saved and you will see the new numbers.)

Each of these perspectives is reasonable—they just focus on different things.  The rank order shifts as you change perspective.  Companies that are not on the top five for either list are necessarily worse than the top five—they may instead have a different philosophy or emphasis in their social performance agenda.

The situation gets more complicated (and our system gets more sophisticated) when you use a profile from an individual user.  For instance, my public profile (you can search for it and find it via the profiles search page under My CSRHUB as “Bahar View”) shows that I value governance more than community and labor treatment a bit more than environment.  It also shows that I have fairly strong views on social issues such as involvement in the military, nuclear power, animal testing, the Tea Party and NRA boycott lists, how working women are treated, involvement in Burma, and Gay and Lesbian rights.  These special issue settings affect my personalized ratings—as they should—and create a “me-centric” view of CSR.

Note that only one of these five companies were on either of the other two lists!  When you use our system create your own profile (you need to register first, but that is free), you get to see who your top five companies are.  You also get a new form of transparency and an easy way to exchange and compare your views with others.  After all, we may not all agree on what is “right,” but we should at least know why our viewpoints differ!

Other people have suggested or offered personalization systems such as the one CSRHUB provides.  However, as far as I know, ours is the first that is publicly available to anyone who wants to use it.  Register, create a profile, and see the world with your own particular lens color and prescription!  Then, when someone asks you who the top five companies are, give them what I believe is the right answer—tell them which companies match your personal social performance profile.