The three letters CSR have been echoing around executive boardrooms for decades.

Responsibility is a word that everyone learns at a young age. Having a responsibility can bring a person joy through dedication, and a sense of fulfillment when we take care of something.

We are all responsible for our actions, and for large corporations, business activities have consequences on the larger society they live in.

Since the turn of the millennia, more medium and small-size businesses have got involved and are helping to tackle global issues through CSR.

This article brings the best CSR activities to your company for a brighter, greener future.

What exactly are CSR activities?

CSR is an acronym that stands for Corporate Social Responsibility. It is a relatively modern umbrella-term for business practices that:

• Are carried out for environmental or social purposes.
• Are voluntary and not prescribed by law.

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One of the reasons it can be a bit tricky to define CSR is that its practices are not part of international law. It’s more like a set of principles or standards a business can follow to promote societal health and environmentalism in their profit-making activities.

Global firms do thankfully have some guidance to follow if they want to increase their CSR presence. The United Nations Global Compact is one such movement companies can join which already has 10,000 companies signed up and is growing.

The ISO 26000 Norm is also one of the most followed sets of guidelines an environmentally-conscious company can get involved with. For a company that wants to know the details of CSR, it’s a very valuable resource.

As most CSR practices are voluntary, different companies, countries and cultures view them differently. Not following CSR ethical principles can damage a company’s profitability and reputation in the eyes of its stakeholders.

So as it currently stands, most CSR activities are not mandatory, but that could be changing in the near future, so it’s really worth getting to grips with them now if you haven’t already. We can only hope that one day all companies value their corporate social responsibilities as highly as their profit margins.

What is Surf Office’s approach to CSR?

So now we’ve gone some way to illustrate what CSR means, we’d love to show you some of the best CSR activities your company can take part in.

Here at Surf Office, we take CSR seriously and we love getting knee-deep in a fun day out that promotes CSR principles. We’ve split activities into three categories: carbon-offsetting, social activities and learning activities (though many of them cross over into all three!).

Note: We're personally involved in every activity on our list, so get in touch to find out more! 

Carbon-offsetting and donating CSR activities

These activities were made with carbon footprints in mind, and aim to promote a holistic appreciation of the environment around us. Try these activities for an injection of deep positivity that carries into your teams’ personal lives

Clean beach challenge

Kicking off our list is one of our favourite activities, that provides environmental-consciousness with a healthy dose of team-building. Beach clean-ups are a pivotal way to protect our coastlines and take care of marine life (and its surrounding biodiversity). That’s a lot of boxes ticked at once!

In a perfect world, every person is directly responsible for their own trash and debris, and so they clean it up. The real world is not always so simple, and the ever-changing tides can sweep in toxic rubbish from miles away. 

Studies from Ocean Conservancy estimate around 8 million tons of plastic enter our oceans each year. Inward tides then pull this plastic to our shores and sadly contaminate a lot of our precious coastlines. Some research from the United Nations shows that as much as 89% of the oceans’ litter is single-use plastic. Using less single-use plastic is something most of us try to do in our day-to-day lives already, but more work needs to be done.

So if you’re looking for team-building that provides a feel-good factor (once it’s complete), a beach clean-up challenge could be a truly rewarding and memorable experience for your teams.

Building bee hotels

Did you know that 70% of the top 100 crops we consume are pollinated by bees? Honey, that’s a lot of food, and we need to keep bees from extinction! 

Building bee hotels is such a fun way to spend the day. Many of us try our best to keep our relationship with bees as healthy as possible. That might be through organic honey farming, pollinator planting or just supporting our local bee-keepers. A bee-keeper is the best person to go to if you’d like a CSR day out that promotes environmentalism.

Bee hotels are growing in popularity, and much like human hotels, they supply accommodation, refreshments and even breakfast to the guests (the bees!). Using scrap materials to build these simple and temporary homes for bees is a doubly great way to give back to our environment. 

So if you’ve got the chance to reach a beekeeper near you, use a day of building bee hotels to bring your teams together and brighten up summer!

“Guarding the Med-”

This team-building activity is more specific than our other mentions as it’s in one specific location; the Mediterranean Sea. There are lots of companies in places like Spain and France that are dedicated to preserving the life and biodiversity of one of the world’s most beautiful oceans. Wouldn’t it be a fantastic thing to involve your teams in?

Most of the world’s oceanic research is carried out by pioneering science companies in Europe, and the Mediterranean Sea is held dear to their hearts. Scientists are helping with underwater forests that encourage safety for animals and sealife who might otherwise be in danger. 

Protecting and guarding the Med is a fabulous trip that brings teams together in unforgettable ways. It takes a bit of planning, but the rewards are more than worth it. Encourage your teams to contribute to a healthier oceanic ecosystem and watch the positivity spread among your workers!

Team building through social CSR activities

Not all CSR activities are aimed solely at our relationship with the environment. Social activities such as these are a great way to boost teamwork and inject positivity into your workforce:

Solidarity challenge

Organizing a solidarity challenge heightens team building through a day of all-round happiness. 

It involves going on an urban tour and thinking about two things: how your local shops are sustained and how to give basic necessities to needy families. These are the basic two principles, then you can get creative.

Set a challenge that involves hidden messages and riddles in the area your teams explore. Help them navigate the streets and cities while solving the riddles you create. The overall aim is to have your teams think about how their local economy supplies local residents. Get as many local shops involved as you can. 

You can even consider letting your teams organize the locations and shops. Many of your staff will want to be involved in their own neighborhood economics, and will shine if you let them! Teams from diverse backgrounds have the chance to shine while developing in-office DEI practices.

Once you’re organized on the location and have some shops involved with the challenge, you could consider creating a donation system at work. Use these donations to buy local supplies and get in touch with your local charities and social services to give back to those in need. It’s a win-win kind of day out!

Food center volunteering

Similarly to our solidarity challenge, this one specifically keeps food in mind. Being fed is a basic human right, and for this challenge, less focus is placed on local food manufacturers, and more focus is on those in need. 

If you can get local food manufacturers and suppliers involved, great! If not, you need to reach out to your local homeless charities and soup kitchens. Soup kitchens have been around since the 1700s and the British Salvation Army. They still operate in thousands of countries around the world and they’re a great way to build teams while giving food to those living rough.

Organizing volunteer groups from your workplace who are eager to help is a fantastic way to lift office spirits and bring in CSR. Charity teambuilding is a wholesome and all-round positive way to bring people together and give something back to the community. 

Learning CSR activities

Our final category of CSR activities aims to educate as much as team-build. Before performing these activities, it can be a really good idea to include an educational session that goes in-depth on the topic. Organize them in your corporate events list to get the ball of positivity rolling! Here are our best ones:

Vertical farm tours

A vertical farm is a pretty new concept. Vertical farms are buildings in which crops are grown in multiple “vertical” layers. Vertical farming uses the premise of normal farming and applies an added principle of space-saving and problem-solving.

A day tour of your local vertical farm can have your teams thinking in new ways. Research shows that in 2022, the vertical farming market was valued at $5.6 billion. Even more impressive is its expected future value of $35 billion in 10 years. These numbers are no laughing matter!

Vertical farming is set to take off big time, so take your teams on a fun and green day out. Vertical farmers and researchers can illustrate to them how thinking in new ways can bear new fruits (and veg!). 

Cutting-edge technology and holistic food practices supply an injection of teambuilding for the day. Make the most of a day out to a vertical farm.

Zero-waste healthy cooking workshop

Most companies already understand the teambuilding value of a cooking workshop, so why not mix it with CSG principles and deliver one with a zero-waste twist? 

Zero-waste cooking is a growing industry that helps people who wonder “Is there anything else I could do with those bits of food and veg bits before I scrape them into the bin?” The answer is a resounding “YES!”. We live in a world where almost one-third of food is lost or wasted each year. None of us enjoy having extra food sitting on our plates when we finish eating, nor throwing useful food bits into the trash. 

A workshop focused on zero-waste and healthy eating ticks a lot of CSG boxes. Your teams will be having a blast too, with something delicious to eat at the end of a productive day (hopefully they keep some for their families too!). Organize a zero-waste workshop to turn up the heat for team building.

Regenerative farm tour and lunch

Our final recommendation for learning CSR activities is a tour of a farm that is focused on regeneration. Regenerative farming is one of the newest topics your teams can learn about in the agricultural world. In the past 10 years, companies like Wildlife Trust have advocated for regenerative farming.

It’s basically farming that, in theory, ensures every part of the farming process can self-regenerate. This includes the soil, land, water and nutrients to self-replenish, whereas traditional farming does away with a lot of used materials.

“Regen” is mostly still in its conceptual stage, but there are lots of companies you can reach out to for a demonstration of early ideas. Who knows, by introducing your teams to a day out studying regen-farming you might be planting the ideas of the future. We definitely see research into regenerative farming growing in the future!

CSR activities electrify team morale, and so do teambuilding retreats!

If boosting morale and team building is the aim of your game, our team-building retreats would be perfect for your company. A twice-annual retreat for your teams provides an unforgettable experience that truly stands out. 

Here at Surf Office, organizing team retreats is what we do best.  

Here’s what we offer:

• Stress-free transfers? We got you! ✅
• Quality-assured accommodations? Check! ✅
• Engaging team-building activities? Our speciality ✅
• Restaurant reservations? That's on us! ✅
• Expert retreat planning assistance? Of course, we have this covered! ✅
• Onsite support, tailored to your needs? Absolutely ✅

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Not only this but we also have access to 160+ locations around Europe, APAC, the US, Latin America, and now Africa, meaning the sky is your limit when it comes to choosing the right location for you and your team.

Let us sort out the tricky logistics for you. Spaces are limited, so get in touch now!