A critical perspective on health-related employee benefits as part of companies' CSR programs

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs are by now an integrated part of doing business (Carroll & Brown, 2018). Today, most companies are thus engaged in activities designed to minimize environmental impact, to secure employee benefits, safe and fair working conditions, etc. (Bruhn & Zimmermann, 2017). With the general trend of healthism in society, a new type of CSR initiative has recently gained momentum: work-site health pro- motion initiatives (Holmqvist, 2009). While the notion of creating the best possible settings for ensuring employees’ health sounds immediately appealing, there is a need for further research focusing on potential critical aspects of incorporating health-related employee benefits into CSR programs. To do that, the purpose of this study is twofold: 1) to provide a mapping of health-related initiatives offered to Danish employees, and 2) to investigate if and how Danish companies communicate about employee health-related initiatives in their CSR reports. The map- ping is based on the top 20 companies on the Danish Sustainability Brand Index in 2018. They were sent a short qualitative email questionnaire to identify which health-related initiatives employees were offered. The mapping subsequently formed the basis for the second part of the study which analysed CSR reports from 2018–2020 from the top 30 from Sustainability Brand Index 2020. The first part resulted in the identification of 50 different kinds of health initiatives which we thematically grouped into ten categories (e.g. physical exercise, mental exercise). These initiatives could furthermore be grouped into five dichotomies (e.g. during working hours vs outside working hours). In the second part of the study, preliminary findings suggest that while many CSR reports mention employee health, this is rarely operationalised beyond “providing a healthy and safe working environment”. From a critical perspective, the mere fact that health has entered the workplace in relation to CSR initiatives could have negative implications for employees, in the form of healthism, medicalization and stigmatization (Herrick, 2009). Furthermore, we found initiatives not confined to the work site as such, but which cross over into the private lives of the employees. The question is whether such initiatives are truly corporate social responsibility, or if they could be viewed as corporate social control, in other words, unethical. Such questions become even more pertinent with the current pandemic.