Answer

Diageo Plc’s East African Breweries Limited (EABL) Corporate Responsibility Plans

            The enormous importance of linking social and environmental roles to corporates is inarguable. The effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is intricate to an organization’s survival as they ripple extensively, both for society and the organization. Company imaging and brand building can be bolstered by its social responsibility in an essence that enhances competitive advantage through brand proliferation (Adeneye & Ahmed, 2015). The vast societal benefits created by an organization that values responsibility to its environment in giving back to the community are coupled by the wide array of benefits it brings into the company’s workforce that in the end enhances productivity, as opined by Story and Neves (2015). With the increasingly intensifying competition, companies are fast turning to CSR to build positive brands while also making a difference in the environment – with a calculated long-term benefit of competitive advantage. Besides these, there is a general expectation that organizations will be giving back to society, another challenge for pursuing CSR. However, it is largely agreed that CSR path is not a linear trajectory, but faces a plethora of mental and ideological barriers for its advocates as well as financial implications for management who also have the task of ensuring profitability. Therefore, CSR often creates a paradoxical situation that dictates for holistic agreement and planning (Chandler, 2019). The obligation of strategically planning CSR is salient, needing holistic consideration of ethical fundaments and actual challenges as well as the projected ones in the course of its successful implementation. Most organizations fail to reach maturity in their implementation of CSR plans, with efforts curtailed by challenges not considered in the planning. This paper is a development of methodological framework for implementing a novel CSR plan for Diageo Plc’s East African Breweries Limited (EABL), a top company in Nairobi, Kenya. The company, like any other contemporary organization, needs an integrated CSR plan that would facilitate its organizational strategies hinged on the dualistic fundamental organizational goals – profit maximization and meeting of stakeholder requirements.

The Ethical Challenges for the Organization

            The company was previously foot ahead of peers and competitors in returning to the community, with its sports sponsorships and talent building, apart from employment of locals. However, with the increase in competition, some of the company’s CSR efforts have been outfaced. This fact leads to rise in ethical challenges that the organization faces.

            The first challenge is in environment conservation. Though the brewer takes good care of waste products from its processing plant by treatment and right disposal procedures, air pollution remains a challenge. The release of toxic gases into the atmosphere is an ethical challenge in its environmental pollution which ripples to play an integral part in the global climate change. This challenge, however, is not unbeknownst to the management, since it is obvious, but its complexity poses a damning difficulty in correction. While a related CSR may be a long shot, especially based on the Kenyan business environment, an alternative impacting CSR activity is needful for ‘social penitence’ and general good.

            Another highlighted challenge is in the company’s workforce composition, with indication of favoritism and recruitment bias. Kenya has a lot of ethnic communities and recruitment favoritism in nepotistic manners is evidenced in most organizations, a practice which is discriminative. Except for the casual workers, this company has been publicly criticized for discriminatory employment which favors a certain ethnic community. This kind of recruitment is likely to affect employee performance and is also a lead cause of high employee turnover, as also argued by Roberts (2015).

            Another ethical issue surrounding the company’s operational environment is the company’s public relations. Especially, the company’s social media presence has been untoward with high negative publicity, owing to the recent predicaments of its local key competitor. There have been claims and theories linking EABL to these troubles in the bid to outface competitor from the competition niche. While the claims may be highly false, the company’s public relations is in jeopardy and needs reversal, an ethical issue that calls for authentic reversal strategies, and CSR is enabling in the revert.

Existing Policies and CSR Practice

            Sports sponsorship. The company’s main CSR activity, after the drop of a once-famous talent promotion campaign aliased ‘Tusker Project Fame’, is in its sports sponsorship. EABL sponsors Tusker FC, a soccer team that plays in the Kenya Premier League. The sponsorship ripples to impact talent growth as well as sports generally. Years ago the company sponsored the Kenya Premier League itself. The company’s commitment to talent-tapping in the Kenyan space is unequivocal through its related CSR activities.

            The company has in place anti-corruption strategy to enhance its social responsibility of nondiscrimination in the workplace. In this plan, the anti-corruption act measure by the company is calculated to enhance corporate equality. The success of the plan is measurable, as the company reports a more diversified employee ethnic composition, as well as employee satisfaction reports that have shown progressive shifts compared to previous years. The strategy is underpinned by global policies that the company is keen to align to.

            Also, EABL’s waste disposal strategies are calculated to ensure limited pollution, with the goal of attaining zero pollution. In the bid to mitigate environmental risks and pollution to enhance environmental sustainability, EABL has made tremendous progress in its implementation of its own environmental acts, by ensuring employee and public engagement, water and affluent management, energy saving, and waste management through their corporately proverbial ZERO WASTE TO LANDFILL commitment.

            EABL has also put in place measures to ensure human rights among their responsibilities. The commitment to remain active and caring about their environmental communities through various ways like participating in occasional amenity provisions in community development has been leveraging towards attainment of human rights, aside from open activism. Further, the company has been committed to respect national sovereignty by ensuring it does not contribute directly or indirectly to human rights violations while doing business. This CSR policy is implemented by both commission and omission.

New Proposed Directions for CSR

            The main direction the organization should take is in public philanthropy. With activities like provision of needful activities in places of dire need and enhancing stakeholders in the philanthropy space, the company’s public imaging will be enhanced tremendously (Peterson, 2018). There have been false complains of the company releasing waste into rivers which has escalated public distaste among Nairobi residents. Public efforts of cleaning the river will reverse the public opinion and relations issues that are rising by day and night. Other activities like enhanced action during times of crises, which are often in Kenya, in provision of relief will also place the brand in the apex of the social scale. These, and many more public philanthropy activities will reverse the general disrelish of the leading brewery brand in the Kenyan space. This will also extensively improve the company’s competitive context. 

            Another angle of action is in environmental activism and action. The rising global trends of environmental activism with the wake of climate change ravages can find such mass production organizations in the right side of history by placing themselves at the forefront of the activism while also actively putting environmental-friendly strategies into action. EABL’s gas emission can be reduced by modernized production technologies to ensure holistic environmental action. Moreover, sponsoring and carrying out public environment sensitization among the populace will further enhance the organization’s environmental responsibility.

            The third angle is a venture into education and business support. The literacy levels in Kenya has been improving, but the cost of education remains a hurdle for many. While EABL’s peers are already taking the initiative to venture into education as CSR, there remains gaps which can be further reduced by EABL’s efforts in this direction. Also, an initiative the support small startup businesses, especially slow ones will ensure lasting multidirectional effects, while also curbing unemployment and ensuring empowerment.

Limitations and Organizational Requirements

            The first limiting factor is in resources. The CSR activities suggested require increased amount of investment in this direction. However, the limitation is in the fact that business has been on the low as competition intensifies. The requirement of balancing stakeholders’ interests and profit maximization in the process of implementing the strategies, especially that of increased public philanthropism, will be a complex task that calls for participatory managerial involvement and goodwill. Low willingness to pay for these CSR activities would be a huge barrier in implementation.

            Government policies and regulatory measures during times of crises is another barrier that will likely limit the organization’s direct participation in danger aversion during such situations. The need to publicize such actions is neither superficial nor antithetic to genuine philanthropism geared towards gaining cheap publicity but rather a calculated strategy to ensure a contingency on both the organization’s macro-environment and micro-environment, a factor which makes it especially needful. In this sense, pact should be sealed with the government to ensure al regulations are met and qualification attained for forefront participation during such times.

            The organization’s need for a strategic vision is pertinent to the success of the CSR plan’s implementation, lack of which is limiting. The need to set up a task force charged with the sole intention of ensuring the strategies’ implementation should be seen as upscaling to the process and thus attained. The consequential success of the SCR’s implementation is attributed to the strategic vision accorded in the framework from inception.

Conclusion

Therefore, it is conclusive that the need to enhance EABL’s CSR activities is enormous and the presented plan is calculated to ensure holistic progress. With the correct strategies in place, implementation of the CSR plan outlined will see eventual success that will ripple in a multidirectional manner.