Day 10 — corporate social responsibility

Microsoft is a company that’s often praised for its corporate social responsibility. It has already committed to net zero waste by 2030, and the elimination of single use plastics by 2025. Both of these steps should go a long way to reducing its carbon footprint and therefore massively benefit the planet. As one of the planet’s biggest and most powerful corporations Microsoft has a duty to give back to the civilisations that allowed it to exist, and this is one of the many ways it does so, benefiting us all.

Microsoft hasn’t just made promises, its also kept incredibly strong commitments like being entirely carbon neutral since 2012 which again does a lot to help with global warming. This shows that corporate social responsibility isn’t just all talk, and can have measurable positive impacts.

However, corporate social responsibility is imperfect and claims made by companies are almost always for PR reasons and not out of a genuine desire for positive change. This doesn’t always mean that their changes are meaningless, as shown in the carbon neutrality, but it does mean that they’re prone to do the minimum possible to get the good publicity and no more. Since these are publicly traded companies they actually have a legal obligation to prioritise profit and so CSR programs must be carefully watched.

Overall, companies like Microsoft have made great progress on a lot of fronts, especially environmental ones, but we always have to keep possible deception in mind due to the internal structures and incentives of these companies and the entirety of Corporate Social Responsibility as a whole.