“We invite companies to self-assess their CSR challenges”
“We invite companies to self-assess their CSR challenges”
Interview with Vincent Canu, Managing Director of osapiens France.
A tool made available to all companies to assess their CSR strategy: this is the ambition behind the questionnaire developed during the fourth workshop of the working group “Regulation – ESG governance as a lever for transformation,” co-founded by osapiens within the Think Tank “2030, Investing in Tomorrow.”
Vincent Canu discusses the origins of this initiative, its rollout, and its objectives.
Why did you decide to create and share a questionnaire on corporate CSR issues?
Building on the work of our group, we wanted to provide something practical for stakeholders. The aim is to help companies position themselves on issues that are objectively complex to grasp. There are many concepts, with wide-ranging applications, and companies often wonder which topics they should prioritize.
The tool we developed is designed to help them ask the right questions and, in particular, determine whether the initiatives they undertake have a real impact. It enables them to assess their level of maturity across many critical issues.
Ultimately, the ambition is that companies’ responses could form the basis of a benchmark, allowing each organization to understand what others are doing. To enable comparisons, we plan to roll out the questionnaire in several European countries over time.
What topics and questions does the questionnaire cover?
The topics are the result of collective work by the experts in our working group, who sought to provide a 360-degree view of corporate challenges, from actions implemented to management structures.
We identified six major pillars covering the full scope of CSR issues, allowing companies to position themselves across each one:
- Strategic steering and effective governance
- CSR/ESG data governance and operational reliability
- Team engagement and cultural transformation
- Regulatory mastery and strategic adaptation
- Engagement with external stakeholders
- Environmental impact, products, services, and resources
Companies rate themselves from 0 to 3 on each question (around forty in total). This is a self-assessment process.
What is the best way, in your view, to use this tool effectively?
We believe this tool can be highly valuable in allowing different departments within a company to express their own perspectives on CSR challenges. The comparison of these views will enrich internal dialogue and foster awareness.
We often observe that within the same company, perceptions differ depending on the profiles of the managers we speak with, particularly regarding practices, CSR priorities, and relationships with stakeholders such as employees, customers, suppliers, and shareholders.
Ultimately, the objective is to confront reality: to identify areas of consensus as well as points of divergence. Our approach is not to impose recommendations but to provide a framework that allows companies to challenge themselves, assess the effectiveness of their actions and organization, and identify their own areas for improvement.
These reflections may lead to deeper thinking about the real impact of their actions, the limits of simple regulatory compliance, data collection methods, stakeholder involvement, team mobilization, and even their business model.
How will this questionnaire be made freely available to companies?
We have developed a digital version, which is already accessible and intended for wide distribution. At the same time, we are preparing a PDF version for companies that prefer this format.
The objective is to make the questionnaire easily available so that every company can freely use it and participate with ease.
