Corporate responsibility expert Malcolm Scovil believes he has found a way to keep his workforce motivated and benefit the wider communityMalcolm ScovilGuardian Professional, Wednesday 6 July 2011 09.53 BSTMalcolm Scovil uses CSR to keep his workforce motivated and benefit the wider community Photograph: AlamyCorporate social responsibility (CSR) is finally being seen as a direct driver of revenue growth and profitability. This represents a huge shift from the old days when companies just made a donation to a local charity and that was that. The good news for those of us that work in corporate responsibility is that the issues related to better governance are steadily rising up the corporate agenda. A recent report from consultants Ernst and Young estimates that social and environmental corporate issues affecting companies now makes up half of all shareholder resolutions.Yet questions remain. Social enterprises, whose very existence is based on the notion that they must exist for the betterment of society, often regard CSR as responsibility light a cosmetic or even spin exercise that doesn't achieve much. On the other hand, CSR is often questioned by mainstream businesses. They ask what will it do for their organisation and how engaging employees through skills-based volunteering, environmental actions and other activities will add value to their bottom line. Full disclosure: I'm a huge advocate of the power of both social enterprise and CSR and spend 80 hours a week running a social enterprise that leverages technology to help companies engage employees in CSR and sustainability.The purpose of this post isn't to suggest that one approach is necessarily better than the other, but to say that in any debate as to how businesses can serve society, companies that integrate a social and environmental strategy into their overall strategy have the greater potential to bring about positive change on a mass scale. This premise is based on the fact that the vast majority of businesses are mainstream, ie not social enterprises which have already bought in to the notion of doing good anyway. One cannot re-engineer most organisations to become social enterprises (even if they wanted to) so the solution must be integration of good and green. In my eyes, this means integrating CSR in a way that makes sense for the business, employees, customers, community and the planet.It is therefore the role of us who believe in the merits of more socially responsible business to convince mainstream organisations that a CSR strategy, with employee engagement as its heart, can make them more profitable and productive while doing their bit for society too. At the same time we need to show how it can be done in the right way so that even CSR's harshest critics within social enterprises would recognise common strands and a return to wider society. So, how do we go about it?Engaging employeesCritical to any argument is the powerful influence that employee engagement has in CSR and the rolesustainability plays in employee motivation. Employees generally feel motivated to work for companies knowing that they actually give a damn about wider society and they're more likely to be