Gathering Scattered Goodwill

There's a strange feeling that comes over you when you start sorting through a company's CSR activities. It's not that we hadn't done good things. If anything, we'd done too many.

Community programs, scholarships, environmental campaigns, employee volunteering. Decades of accumulated programs, scattered across departments and worksites. Each one means something. The problem is that if you ask someone to explain it all in one line, nobody can.

What it means to sort out the legacy

At first I thought it was a simple job. Collect the scattered programs, put them in a table, group the similar ones together.

It wasn't.

Every program started in a different context. One was someone's pet project, another began as an outside request, and another just got repeated every year out of habit. The moment you try to fit it into a cell in a table, the question follows: "Why did you put this here?" Sorting turned out to be less about technique and more about persuasion.

The one line that defines CSR

The hardest part is deciding what kind of company we are, at the core.

Environment, as fits an energy company? Shared growth, as fits a regionally rooted business? Education for the next generation? They're all true, which means if you try to hold all of them, nothing is left. You only see what a company stands for once you decide what it won't do.

CSR that fits the business

Back when I was at Today's House, I planned a furniture upcycling hackathon. I happened to see an internal message saying the logistics center was about to scrap more than a thousand pieces of furniture damaged in transit. It felt like a waste to throw away furniture that was still usable.

Writing a check is the clean version of CSR. But it has nothing to do with the fact that we were a company that sells furniture. So we tried something different. Using the discarded furniture as material, more than thirty people, from elementary schoolers to carpenters, spent two days making pieces in a warehouse on Amtae Island in Sinan. We exhibited the work in Seoul's Donuimun for three months, then donated all of it to the region.

A bike rack, an infinity mirror table, a tidal-flat dresser. One-of-a-kind pieces came out of it, and it became the company's first CSR case.

This is what I think good CSR looks like. It connects to what the company actually does, and because of that, it becomes a story. The point isn't how much money you spent. It's that there's a reason this particular company did this particular thing.

What we're trying to do at the company now is the same. Gathering scattered activities back under a single line that ties to our business.

Reporting is its own problem

Building the framework is hard, and reporting on it is just as hard.

CSR has no clean metric the way revenue does. To make the case that "this is the right direction," you end up having to show the logic and the picture together. Bridging that gap in a room where people want to hear qualitative things in quantitative terms is the recurring assignment. I've lost count of how many times I've revised the strategy document.

Still

We've got a rough direction for what the company stands for, and the legacy is now organized.

And one thing has become clear in the process. Being a company that can say what it does matters more than being a company that does a lot of good. Gathering scattered goodwill into a single direction. That's what I'm holding onto right now.

I'll write again once there are more results.