04.18.2024 Bahar Gidwani
Matthew 7:2
Matthew’s Biblical warning has now come true: “For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”
Yes, CSRHub LLC, the developer of the CSRHub sustainability ratings web site, now has a CSRHub rating!
Fortunately, our scores look pretty good. We appear to be well-governed and to have a positive impact on the community we serve (primarily sustainability professionals and their advisors). Our environmental rating is helped by the fact that we are a virtual company. Each of our team members works out of his or her own home office. This keeps our carbon footprint low and limits our resource use (everything we do internally is via email and file transfer).
We have only five sources driving our ratings. This is a low number, but fortunately we did the full B Corp assessment (we got a rating from them of 101—which is very good). This combined with the fact that we belong to a number of sustainability-related organizations and had registered with folks like GreenPages Directory and ImpactSpace gave us enough visible information to allow us to publish our own scores.
Of course, as soon as our team and our vendors saw that we were rated, we started to get questions. In particular, a number of team members complained about our low Employee rating. As you can see from the more detailed drill down below, our compensation is a bit low (probably relating to being an early stage, virtual company). Our diversity is good. But, our training, health and safety number is pretty weak.
Again, this number doesn’t seem as meaningful in a virtual company setting as it would for a factory or large office building environment. It is unclear what training we’d give our team (they come to us often with remarkably high skill levels that would be hard for us to improve!) or what safety concerns our team faces as they commute to their home offices. Yes, they could trip on the way to the kitchen for a cup of coffee…but it seems hard to hold CSRHub responsible for a dog that bounds into their path or a toy left on the floor!
Still, we should have more formal policies on health and safety—and provide longer-term training support for team members who need it. Now that we know where we stand, we intend to ask our team to help us improve in this area. We hope this is an example of how our service can accomplish its mission of encouraging greater corporate social responsibility as we extend our ratings to include smaller, privately held companies.
Search a company on CSRHub and see their sustainability performance.
Bahar Gidwani is CEO and Co-founder of CSRHub. He has built and run large technology-based businesses for many years. Bahar holds a CFA, worked on Wall Street with Kidder, Peabody, and with McKinsey & Co. Bahar has consulted to a number of major companies and currently serves on the board of several software and Web companies. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School and an undergraduate degree in physics and astronomy. He plays bridge, races sailboats, and is based in New York City.
CSRHub provides access to the world’s largest corporate social responsibility and sustainability ratings and information. It covers over 17,000 companies from 135 industries in 133 countries. By aggregating and normalizing the information from 500 data sources, CSRHub has created a broad, consistent rating system and a searchable database that links millions of rating elements back to their source. Managers, researchers and activists use CSRHub to benchmark company performance, learn how stakeholders evaluate company CSR practices, and seek ways to improve corporate sustainability performance.
