The term “Corporate Social Responsibility” (CSR) is widely used as a measure of how “ethical” an employer is. This covers a range of areas:

• Environment: commitment to reducing the environmental impact of the company’s operations; does the company operate in an area that is fundamentally destructive to the environment?

• Community: what is the impact of operations on local or global communities? Workplace Practices: are employees treated with respect, do they have proper rights, are they properly developed a treated fairly and equally?

• Business Conduct: does the company behave properly when developing, buying, selling and marketing products?

• Investment: does the company make socially responsible investments, i.e. only place its money with companies that met its own ethical standards?

• Governance: is the company transparent in reporting, does it conduct itself properly, does it comply with all appropriate laws and regulations?

Here are some questions you can ask yourself:

• what sort of media coverage does the company get – favourable or unfavourable? Why? Is the core purpose of the company good, bad or indifferent?

• Does the company’s mission statement, core values, and stated policies meet your own values?

• Does the company measure itself against peers, frameworks (e.g. the Corporate Responsibility Index (CRI) , Global Reporting Initiatives, FTSE4Good , Dow Jones Sustainability Index ), recognised standards?
  
• Does the company have a good mix of genders, ethnic diversity, age ranges

• Are employees happy? Would you be happy to work for the company? If you are applying to a small company or enterprise then it may be more difficult to find out information. Establishing ethical and environmental awareness may be the best you can achieve.

Companies that advertise through Ethical Jobs stand a better chance than most of having high ethical standards. See our definition of ethical. Beware of companies that think that calling themselves “carbon neutral” is a job done. They are probably paying small amounts of money to offset their carbon emissions and giving very little thought to the real challenges and things they an do to reduce their carbon footprint. These are prime examples of greenwash.