CSR and Competitiveness European SMEs - KMU Forschung Austria

36 CSR and Competitiveness - European SMEs’ Good Practice - Consolidated European Report
In most of the cases, the implementation of CSR measures is based upon ad-hoc decisions,
i.e. are not related to the business strategy in terms of being written down in the enterprises’
strategy document (e.g. business plan). Data from Romania, for example, show that only 5 % of
the companies have a fixed annual budget for donations and 25 % try to have a regular system
for giving to charity (Source: AmCham – the American Chamber of Commerce in Romania).
Also for Austria it was found that only 14 % of the enterprises plan their CSR activities in a
strategic way (Deuerlein et al., 2003).
The CSR activities of SMEs are often done in an occasional way. The ENSR Survey 2001, for
example, shows that 51 % of the European SMEs which are involved in external social activities
carry out these activities on an occasional basis and 45 % conduct regular activities. Social
activities which are done regularly and are related to the business strategy become more
common as the enterprise size increases. (European Communities, 2002)
Particularly in Finland and Norway, the occasional character of SMEs’ external CSR activities
becomes obvious while e.g. Spanish or German enterprises mainly conduct regular community
activities. In the majority of the countries these activities are performed unrelated to their
business strategy, with e.g. the exception of Austria where 53 % of the enterprises conduct
social activities in relation to their business strategy (in an occasional or regular way).
Table 3 SMEs’ Strategic Approach to External Social Activities by Analysed Country 1
Austria
Finland
Germany
Norway
Spain Total 2
Occasional activities, unrelated to business strategy 20 64 31 56 27 37
Occasional activities, related to business strategy 29 13 17 14 15 14
Regular activities, unrelated to business strategy 24 8 27 21 45 31
Regular activities, unrelated to business strategy 24 6 24 4 11 14
Do not know/ No answer 2 8 3 5 2 4
1
As the Observatory of European SMEs 2002 covers the EU-15 plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland no
data is available for Poland and Romania.
2
EU-15, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland
Source: European Communities, 2002
Nevertheless, the majority of SMEs analysed in this study indicate that they plan to continue
their CSR activities or even want to expand them. So, it can be concluded that although in the
vast majority of cases no monitoring of CSR activities in terms of assessing its (economic)
outcome is conducted by the European SMEs, they are rather satisfied with the effects they
observe.
In case of SMEs these actions usually have a form of financial or material support while large
companies more and more often focus the CSR actions at increasing social awareness about
particular issues e.g. health, environment, tolerance, safety etc.
As has been mentioned above (see chapter 3.3) European SMEs concentrate their CSR activeties
on four potential “target groups” (employees, the market, the society and the environment)
as well as on comprehensive approaches combining two or more fields of action. As to this
regard, however, differences with regard to the level of engagement in the different fields can
be observed.
The smaller the company the more important are employees as the main target group for CSR
initiatives whereas CSR activities among large enterprises have a predominately external-tothe-enterprise
focus (Murillo/Lozano, 2006). This can be shown by various national studies. For
example, 54 % of Danish SMEs have implemented workforce related CSR activities (TNS
Gallup, 2005) and also a survey among SMEs in the United Kingdom shows that their most
popular social responsibility is directed towards their employees (Business in the Community,