Involving While Evolving: A case study of Alfa Laval’s internal CSR communication

Sammanfattning: There is an increasing need for companies to showcase and communicate their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives to stakeholders, yet the majority of former research on CSR communication provides little insight into how CSR is communicated to internal stakeholders. This thesis aims to understand from an employee and managerial perspective how a Swedish CSR frontrunner communicates its CSR efforts to internal stakeholders and how the company uses internal CSR communication to involve its employees in CSR initiatives. The material was gathered through interviews with 15 employees and managers from Alfa Laval, a Swedish multinational manufacturing company. By using the Stakeholder Participation Typology and the Stakeholder CSR strategies as a theoretical framework in the analysis, the findings reveal that the company’s CSR communication is quite weak, as employee awareness of CSR initiatives is limited to the environmental aspects of CSR, mostly in relation to the products. It is also shown that employee participation in CSR activities is for the most part on an informative level. Alfa Laval tends to use one-way communication rather than entering into dialogue with employees regarding CSR decisions and initiatives. The study concludes that the company needs to adopt a different CSR communication strategy internally to reap the benefits of one of its most important stakeholder groups, employees. It also provides valuable implications on how multinationals can use internal CSR communication effectively and benefit from increased employee participation in CSR initiatives.