The Rijksdienst voor Ondernemend Nederland (RVO) encourages entrepreneurs and organizations to engage in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). For example, companies and organizations that do business abroad and want to make use of the RVO’s International Programs must endorse the OECD guidelines. However, the RVO currently has insufficient insight into how companies actually proceed and how effective promoting (international) CSR is in practice. Therefore, on behalf of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) system is now being developed, which will give the RFO insight into the CSR performance of entrepreneurs and the effectiveness of its own policy.
With a multidisciplinary team of scientists, IT specialists and CSR experts, Empact is supporting the RFO in designing the MEL system. By now, the first phase of the project has been completed and the RFO has all the ingredients to move forward with building the IT infrastructure. For this article, we spoke with Kristine Ocon, CSR advisor and project leader at the RFO, about how the project has gone so far and the experiences with Empact.
“We are very enthusiastic. I haven’t often experienced projects that have gone so smoothly in collaboration.”
Step by step
In order to properly identify the extent to which companies and organizations operate in a socially responsible manner, the project was divided into steps and research questions were drawn up in advance. Important questions included which subsidies and other instruments are eligible and how compliance with OECD guidelines can be translated into KPIs.
Therefore, a funnel approach was chosen. “We started funneling a lot of information from a lot of different programs. So what are we going to focus on? Which programs are relevant then? What should the MEL system ultimately be able to answer? And that’s how you make choices and that’s how we ended up with a self-assessment using a questionnaire that you present to companies to come up with answers.”
By dividing the project into steps, there was always an intermediate result that served as the basis for the next step. This created peace and clarity. Kristine: “Because we had divided the project into seven work steps, there was always an intermediate product. This gave us an overview and allowed us to say, “Okay, now it is ready, or this or that still needs to be adjusted. That makes it very easy towards the end, because then you have so many intermediate products that you have already approved or that you are all satisfied with. As a result, there are no more surprises at the end. That’s actually quite nice.”
“Because we had organized the project into seven work steps, an intermediate product came out of that each time. That makes it very easy toward the end, because by then you already have so many intermediate products that you have already approved or are all satisfied with.”
All the ingredients for a system to monitor, evaluate and learn
The result of this phase of the project is a self-assessment that can be presented to entrepreneurs from time to time. In the next phase, in collaboration with Empact, an IT system and dashboard will be developed around these questions that will allow entrepreneurs, the RFO and other stakeholders to measure, evaluate and learn.
“The idea is that the company that completes the questionnaire also gets an immediate report and can see what it has completed. This gives the company some pointers to get started. The RFO project advisor also gets to see the results, so he or she can prepare for the conversation with the entrepreneur. A second is the overall picture of all entrepreneurs from all instruments together, so we can zoom out and start seeing trends and developments.” In this way, one’s own policies can be evaluated. “A third is that we can use it over several years later to start seeing developments and learning. The company itself learns what it can do even better and we in turn learn about bottlenecks at companies. This way we find out how to improve our services so that the companies can more easily take the next step.”
“The company itself learns what it can do even better and we in turn learn about bottlenecks at companies.”
Empact’s expert team and network
Empact collaborated with scientists from the University of Amsterdam for this project, forming the expert team. “I really liked the fact that with the expert team in place, we had the best mix of experts for this project, including the IT specialist. It’s also nice for me to have assurance that someone with in-depth knowledge of the OECD and methodologies is watching. With the approval of experts on a particular topic, it is also easier to bring others into this.”
Empact’s network also came in handy when the RFO could not quickly find enough companies of its own to test the self-assessment. “That’s when Empact also jumped in to tap into its own network for that as well, and that’s how we were able to move forward. That is very pleasant in the cooperation.”
Smooth collaboration
From Empact, we experienced the cooperation with the two project leaders of the RFO as extremely pleasant and professional. According to Kristine, this is entirely mutual: “We are both very enthusiastic. I haven’t often experienced projects that went so smoothly in collaboration. We had a working method that we were all comfortable with. We had regular meetings and knew each time what was on the agenda to discuss and what action to take then. And of course not everything went without a hitch. Sometimes things took a little longer, but we got through them just fine. At a certain point you decide with each other: okay, this phase is taking too long now, we’ll cut the Gordian knot and then you can move on. I also liked the high quality of the work and I really had few comments on intermediate products. What I also appreciated was that Empacts Martin de Jong and Teresa Brose are good listeners and were thus able to translate our needs well into what we then had to do.”
Kristine Ocon
Thanks to Empact, RFO can now take the next step toward understanding the CSR performance of entrepreneurs and the effectiveness of public policy.