CSR Barometer 2024: how games can help companies
In 2024, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is more than ever a cornerstone of organisational strategy. With environmental and social challenges mounting, companies need to step up their efforts to involve employees in this essential work. Yet the CSR Barometer 2024 shows that, despite growing awareness, getting teams genuinely involved remains a major challenge. This is where Arcane Experience offers a fresh approach an innovative one through gamification, to spark engagement and turn CSR goals into concrete, lasting action.
What does the CSR Barometer 2024 mean for companies?
The CSR Barometer 2024 has become a benchmark study, giving companies a full picture of progress and challenges in corporate social responsibility. Its impact works on several levels, making it a valuable tool for organisations of every size.
First, the barometer serves as a strategic benchmarking tool, helping companies position themselves against their peers and against market best practice. That comparison fuels healthy competition and pushes organisations to raise their CSR ambitions. At the same time, by highlighting the areas where progress is most urgent, it guides decision-makers in allocating resources wisely, helping them prioritise their CSR investments and efforts.
The study also reveals what stakeholders expect, reflecting how societal concerns are evolving. Companies can then align their CSR strategy with the current expectations of their employees, customers and investors. By identifying the barriers that still hold back CSR engagement, the barometer also encourages the search for innovative solutions, such as gamification, to overcome them.
Finally, the findings provide tangible arguments for internal awareness-raising and for demonstrating the strategic importance of CSR, making it easier to rally teams around issues that are crucial to the future of both business and society.
CSR Barometer 2024: the barriers to employee engagement in CSR
Awareness of CSR issues is growing within companies, yet genuine employee engagement remains a major challenge. The CSR Barometer 2024 highlights several persistent barriers that hold back staff involvement in corporate social responsibility initiatives.
A lack of time and resources
The main barrier identified by companies is still a lack of time. In a working environment where productivity rules, employees struggle to carve out time to invest in CSR projects.
Spending on CSR has also stalled since 2021. A third of companies still have no dedicated budget, while another third has no specialist team. This lack of resources severely limits the reach and impact of CSR initiatives, discouraging employees who may see these actions as secondary or superficial.
The difficulty of measuring the impact of CSR actions
Another significant barrier is how hard it is to assess the concrete results of CSR actions. The barometer shows that a large majority of companies struggle to measure the impact of their initiatives. Without tangible results, employees can quickly lose motivation, as they find it hard to see the real effects of their involvement.
The complexity of CSR issues
CSR topics, whether climate change, biodiversity or social issues, are often seen as complex and intimidating. That perception can leave employees feeling powerless, as though they lack the tools to act effectively. Too little awareness-raising and in-depth training on these subjects keeps CSR at a distance from people’s day-to-day work.
CSR Barometer 2024: games as an innovative answer to CSR engagement
Faced with these persistent engagement challenges, games are emerging as an innovative and highly effective solution. This approach, known as gamification, turns complex issues into playful, participatory experiences that encourage learning, involvement and concrete action.
Learning while having fun
Games offer a natural, intuitive learning environment. As Dominique du Paty, President of Réseau H, puts it: “games engage people. Doing things together creates engagement, and the brain works better, because it generates pleasure and empathy.” This approach makes complex CSR information accessible and memorable, drawing on our innate tendency to learn through play.
Getting participants actively involved
Unlike traditional awareness-raising methods, games put employees right at the heart of the action. Benjamin Coutière, founder of Bridgentu, explains that “games create group dynamics. Participants enjoy time together as a team, discover new things and never feel alone.” This active involvement strengthens both a sense of belonging and a sense of responsibility towards CSR issues.
Sparking positive emotions
Games have the power to trigger positive emotions, which are essential to drive change. Erika Girault, from the Fédération Artisans du Monde, points out that “emotions are what drive people to act.” By creating joyful, stimulating experiences around CSR themes, games build an emotional connection that encourages long-term engagement.
CSR Barometer 2024: the benefits of gamification for corporate CSR
Bringing gamification into a company’s CSR strategy delivers many advantages. It goes beyond awareness-raising to become a genuine lever for transformation and for shifting the figures behind the CSR Barometer 2024. Here are the main benefits observed:
A clearer grasp of the issues raised by the CSR Barometer 2024
Gamification makes concepts that often feel abstract or complex concrete and easy to grasp. For example, the game “Follow the Brain”, developed in partnership with Réseau H, immerses players in how the brain works and in its cognitive biases. This playful approach makes it easier to understand the mechanisms behind discriminatory behaviour, raising employee awareness of diversity and inclusion in a genuinely effective way.
Games such as the Climate Fresk help players visualise the connections between the different facets of climate change, offering a systemic view that would be hard to convey through conventional training. That deeper understanding is essential to building lasting, well-informed employee engagement.
Stronger team cohesion
CSR games, particularly in event formats, create special moments of sharing and collaboration. As Charlotte Jamet of la Koncepteriepoints out, these experiences “create desire, pleasure and emotion among our audiences”. By working together on playful CSR challenges, employees strengthen their bonds, develop a shared vision and learn to combine their complementary skills around common goals.
This stronger cohesion doesn’t end when the game does: it carries over into everyday working life, fostering a company culture that is more collaborative and more committed to CSR.
Sparking creativity and CSR innovation
Gamification creates a safe space where employees can explore new ideas and solutions without fear of failure. This playful setting stimulates creativity and encourages initiative. A simulation game on the circular economy, for instance, can lead teams to imagine innovative ways to cut waste or optimise resource use within their company.
That creative spark can lead to real CSR innovations, from more sustainable internal processes to eco-designed products or services with a positive social impact.
Measuring and recognising engagement
Unlike traditional methods, gamification comes with built-in measurement tools that quantify employee engagement and progress. These metrics (scores, levels reached, challenges completed) provide concrete indicators of team involvement, addressing the common difficulty of measuring the impact of CSR actions.
Gamification also recognises individual and collective effort through reward and recognition systems, strengthening motivation and employees’ long-term engagement in the company’s CSR journey.
CSR Barometer 2024: building an effective CSR gamification strategy
A successful CSR gamification strategy built on the CSR Barometer 2024 calls for a considered, structured approach. Here are the key steps to maximise its impact:
Identify the company’s priority CSR objectives
The first step is to clarify the CSR issues specific to your company. Aligning the gamification strategy with the priorities set out in the overall CSR policy is essential. If cutting the carbon footprint is a major objective, for example, the games developed should focus on that theme. This targeted approach keeps the playful activities relevant and consistent with the company’s CSR vision.
Choose a game format that fits your company culture
The choice of format should take account of company culture, employees’ working habits and logistical constraints. For a company with geographically dispersed teams, an online serious game may be more suitable.
Where the culture favours face-to-face interaction, playful workshops such as “Les infiltrés de la QVCT” can work better for tackling subjects like workplace wellbeing.
