The research, which included extensive interviews with CSR leaders and teams across multiple corporations, found a common sentiment amongst interviewees - they did not want their roles to be regarded as simply a tick-box exercise, but wanted to see their companies actively living by their brand and corporate values.

Given their responsibility to understand the needs of their communities and demonstrate a positive impact through initiatives such as employee volunteering and community support, WellGiving identified a number of key issues facing CSR leaders in achieving these aims in an initial summary of the report, including:

• Management and reporting of global CSR initiatives was found to be among one of the top concerns, being both admin-intensive and time-consuming, while failing to produce detailed impact data.
• Many CSR leaders were faced with apathy and scepticism from employees, with a lack of buy-in from managers, making setting wellbeing goals and maintaining charity partnerships a challenge across departments.
• Employee engagement as a whole was identified as another major barrier, with a difficulty in aligning staff with new and existing CSR strategies.

These findings follow WellGiving’s HealthTech 50 ranking, highlighting the most innovative start-ups, scale-ups and established technology firms with a focus on original tech for personal and preventative healthcare.

Developers of the WellGiving platform have worked closely with Chief Executives, HR leaders and CSR teams from corporations both large and small to create the platform, and their recent report sheds light on several issues exacerbated by new models of remote and hybrid working across disparate and global teams.

Discussing the research, Paul Rhodes, founder of WellGiving, said: “One of the most telling things about our latest research was, despite the lack of buy-in and the barriers faced by many CSR leaders, they remain extremely passionate about the work they do and the impact they have on employees and their communities. The ultimate goal for CSR leaders is creating social value, and being able to measure the positive impacts their companies create for the economy, society and community.

“With many remote workers being onboarded virtually, and thus not used to office environments, it poses a huge challenge for CSR leaders to create those water-cooler moments and keep staff engaged with CSR initiatives.

“At WellGiving, we understand the need for a hyper-localised approach that allows employees to fundraise for causes that are close to their hearts, thereby driving engagement and boosting the social value and impact of these initiatives, and we are constantly developing new and innovative ways to allow CSR leaders to do just this.”

Following a successful beta stage in 2021, WellGiving launched in January 2022 with the aim of creating a platform that would allow companies to improve the mental and physical wellbeing of their staff through the gamification of physical activity, while also giving businesses the chance to raise funds for charities that were hit hard during the pandemic. The platform is now on track to raise in excess of £1 million for charities across the UK and beyond, while helping corporations meet and exceed their CSR and wellbeing initiatives.