Effective internal environment‐related communication

Abstract

PurposeThe paper aims to understand what kinds of internal messages concerning a company's environment‐related corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities would be most effective in engaging employees in implementing an organization's environmental strategy. Furthermore, the paper explores how environmentally active employees could be utilized as internal communicators to spread environmental activity internally.Design/methodology/approachThe paper reports on findings from interviews (n=12) conducted within a multinational case company that has recently adopted an active approach to communicating its environmental policy internally.FindingsEmployees whose work does not have a clear environmental impact can find corporate environmental policies distant, and would rather see simple, practical messages about what they can do for the environment in their jobs. Furthermore, employees might ignore environmental considerations if they are too busy at work. To encourage environmentally active employees to share their ideas, it might be useful to assign clear environmental contact persons to each department, because employees may be unwilling to approach colleagues directly with environment‐related suggestions.Practical implicationsAt a time when most companies are striving to be greener, the findings help organizations understand how they can communicate effectively to encourage all employees to consider the environment in their jobs. In addition, the results point to how organizations can better utilize environmentally active employees for internal promotion of environmental strategies.Originality/valueThe paper extends research on CSR communication to consider internal communication within an organization. In addition, it adopts the perspective of employees to bring new insight into their role in CSR‐related activities.

Employees’ perceived benefits from participating in CSR activities and implications for increasing employees engagement in CSR

“…Hence, if organizations apply the insights of this study to improve target-group specific communication, this could foster employee motivation to participate in CSR activities. This study offers several useful suggestions for effective internal CSR communications and can be discussed in relation to relevant literature, such as Dhanesh (2012) and Uusi-Rauva and Nurkka (2010). Corporate communication departments aware of these benefit clusters can communicate the returns of CSR participation to appeal to specific groups.…”

Regional Tendencies of Corporate Social Responsibility

“…Therefore, the "internal" stakeholders receive too little attention. Besides, a sufficiently limited arsenal of possible internal communication measures is used to promote corporate social responsibility ideas [64].…”

Sceptical Employees as CSR Ambassadors in Times of Financial Uncertainty

“…The field in which CSR investment is made is surely a very important factor to the organisation-employee relationship building (Uusi-Rauva & Nurkka, 2010;Podnar & Golob, 2007); however, Morsing et al (2008) highlight the importance of ensuring the employees' involvement with the CSR strategy before anything else. Therefore employees' involvement with the domain of investment should be examined.…”

“…Emerald does not grant permission for this article to be further copied/distributed or hosted elsewhere without the express permission from Emerald Group Publishing Limited. 16 direct the employees to identify the relevance of the CSR investment to themselves (Uusi-Rauva & Nurkka, 2010), rather than the other way round.…”