About CSR in Estonia

At times when Estonia is a newly joined part of Europen Union, many issues that were not that obvious and relevant earlier stand as challenges for further growth and sustainable development. Some of the examples being issues such as how to retain its best employees, providing them competitive working and living environment as well as how to attract new investments & produce high quality competitive products/services for a European market, or how to become a knowledge society with hub of innovative ideas as the advantage of low production costs is moving towards East and Asia.

On a global scale, given the size of the market Estonia is and will be a part of bigger value chains, mostly supplying, producing, consuming or living under some influence of larger Multinational Enterprises (MNEs). Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as well as Sustainable Development of the country as well as surrounding environment brings many opportunities to grasp, tackle and go ahead with. A question that arises in this context is whether at this stage of development different players in the society would step into cross-sector dialogue and think broader about how to ensure the sustainability of communities and bring value to broader scale of stakeholders or wait until EU or larger MNEs CSR agenda would become a priority in Eastern-European communities, including Estonia? Or should it come from bottom-up as it’s the major beneficiary is the bottom itself?

CSR in Estonian Companies

Having gone through many changes in the last decades, living under different
regimes and ideologies, as being a part of socialism where what is understood as philanthropy today, e.g. helping or even adopting schools and hospitals etc of the surrounding environment was a common practice.
Tremendous changes and the boost of independence fights and strengthening of the nationalism, the whole change of paradigm coming with the market economy where profit was the only end influencing shift in values and causing big value clashes between young generation that has been risen in the market economy and the other extreme that was influenced but is still living somewhere in between of different value sets.

With this background, facing the overall concept of CSR would hypothetically bring out different connotations and reactions, starting from “giving” from the socialism era, to very strong business-case approach. Generation that has been shifted from one
paradigm by 180 degrees to pure business thinking would likely look at broader
triple bottom line and balancing the needs of different stakeholders and not only the shareholders as something fluffy. It should be also admitted that CSR is not a part of Business Schools curricula in Estonia as for yet.

The study conducted among Estonian CEOs of the bigger companies demonstrated that companies that had extended view of their stakeholders & associated their CSR with bringing added value in the stakeholder relationships were more proactive in CSR. In fact, on the scale reactive-proactive Estonian businesses tend to be more on a proactive side although more towards the middle point of the scale being classified as to the accommodative type of perception.  However different factors such as the nature of ownership and share, business field, the historical background and culture of the companies have their influence on the perception and practice. As the study was conducted with individuals, individual background and experience had also their impact on the results.

In terms of CSR practice there is a lot of room to learn from other countries perspectives as well as from company to company practices within Estonia. CSR is not yet an integrated part of business education though extended view of stakeholders and creating the balance between different stakeholder groups expectations would require managers that have a knowledge and skills for that.

 In the context where Estonia is a part of European Union and becoming more integrated in European market where CSR is turning to a separate professional field, the drive for the CSR is inevitable. There is an opportunity to wait and let the area to be imposed by the agenda, definition and thinking of west as well as an opportunity to find and activate the drive from inside and build on already existing practice.