As part of the RSE.COOP programme, the Catalan Confederation of Cooperatives has designed a special tool to provide a quantitative measurement of the degree of corporate social responsibility (CSR) of the cooperatives and worker-owned companies participating in the project.
The tool consists of three clearly defined parts:
1 - A statement containing 30 commitments detailing the general actions which participating companies will have to include in their economic, environmental, and social policies in order to integrate CSR into their everyday business activities.
2 - A set of criteria to evaluate each company’s level of commitment to CSR in accordance with different aspects such as company size, business activity, and geographical location.
3 - A series of indicators that can be used to measure levels of compliance with each of the 30 commitments, and which can also be used to implement and evaluate the company’s CSR policies.
Prior to being used with the pilot companies chosen to participate in the programme, the tool was tested at two levels:
Nivell 1 - Theoretical review by a multidisciplinary team of experts during the design process. Team members included Luciano Sánchez (sociologist and local development expert), Manuel Sánchez (economist and specialist in the implementation of social responsibility processes in SMEs), Antoni Comin (instructor at ESADE Business School), Teresa Udina (Head of the CSR commission at the cooperative Abacus), Cristobol Colon (psychologist and President of Fageda SCCL), Carles Campuzano (Member of Parliament and member of the expert commission on CSR of the Spanish Parliament), and Alfonso Garre (Deputy R&D Manager at Aenor).
Nivell 2 - Practical testing of tool in three cooperatives: Corma, Eas, and La Fageda.
The digitalization of the CSR tool was realized in RSE.COOP project. The tool was freely available to users from november of 2007.
