Application of corporate social responsibility app

Authors: Dimitar Matev Mariana Assenova

Publish Date: 2012/08/16

Volume: 14, Issue: 6, Pages: 1065-1073

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Abstract

The rapidly developing tourism industry in Bulgaria in the last 15 years especially at the Black sea coast contributed to an entire change in the accommodation sector The growth was due to unseen construction of new accommodation facilities and entire renovation of the existing ones At the same time the tourism industry suffers from many social problems lack of staff shortage of qualified staff especially in the highstar hotels very high rate of turnover flow of Bulgarian staff abroad The bigger mobility of the employees is facilitated by the seasonal character of the industry knowledge of foreign languages difference in payments as well as in the nature of work Overall this leads to lost training investments reduces the incentives for employers to provide training causes lower quality services in hotels and finally impacts negatively the competitiveness of the hotel sector in Bulgaria and its sustainable development The paper presents the practical experience and conclusions from a corporate social responsibility CSR assessment in 25 Bulgarian hotels regarding the social issues of the CSR human resource management occupational safety and health human and labour rights stakeholder and community involvement customer satisfaction The most important social problems identified are deficiency in management skills deficiency in organised external stakeholder dialogue lack of qualified staff in certain professions lack of investment in training high turnover low motivation conflicts related to wage levels overtime etc A set of key performance indicators related to social responsibility is suggested and analysed The benchmarking process is discussed and exemplary benchmarks are quoted The most frequently proposed measures by the hotel CSR teams to improve the social responsibility in the hotels are reviewedWe would like to thank to Mrs Petra Schwager from UNIDO who was the project manager of the project “Sustainable development of enterprises in Bulgaria” funded by the Swiss Government to Mr Alexander Kunze from Neosys Swiss consultant who coordinated the CSR consultancy in the project and has major methodological contribution to the project and to Mr Mathias Leisinger Head of the Corporate Responsibility Department of Kuoni for providing the opportunity to collaborate in the efforts towards more responsible and competitive tourism sector in Bulgaria as well as for the methodological support Special gratitude to all the Bulgarian CSR experts who carried out the inplant assessments of hotels in different areas of the country worked with the hotel management and personnel collected and processed diligently the data especially to Daniela Aneva Fani Semerdjieva Iva Yakimova Ivan Ivanov Irina Shukerova Kristiana Kazandjieva Margarita Mikrenska Marina Stefanova Maria Dimitrova Miroslava Dakovska Nikolai Georgiev and Pavlin Vaskov We want to thank also the tourism enterprises’ owners and managers dedicated to improving their competitiveness by committing efforts to better social responsibility

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