Does social CSR pay off? Corporate social responsibility (CSR), employees and HR management: what workers really see when a company says it cares, with Lukáš Vartiak. One factory in Slovakia, 51 answers, and a result that surprised me.
Many companies have a CSR plan: a document, a report, a page on the website. But workers do not read the report. They see other things: training, health and safety, workload, work–life balance, and how their boss treats them. A team invited 115 employees of a Slovak manufacturing firm to a survey on the social pillar of CSR and its value for the business; 51 answered. Only 17 of the 40 workers with a university degree said the firm had an official CSR strategy for its people; among those without a degree, 10 of 11 said yes.
I talk with Lukáš Vartiak, Associate Professor at the Institute of Mediamatics, Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences, Comenius University Bratislava, and first author of the study, published in 2026 in the journal Interpersona. This episode is about the research process behind human resource management and CSR, and about what the data cannot prove.
In this episode:
- How responsibility travels from a strategy document to a normal working day.
- What had to be given up: with a cross-sectional survey of 51 employees you see patterns, not causes.
- Why study one single company, and why it is a first step, not all of Slovakia.
- Getting access to a firm: management agreement, working time, no names, and whose voices are missing.
- What an «I don’t know» answer really means in employee surveys.
- The next study: several factories over time, before and after a real change.
- Advice for the next five years: build a relationship that lets you go back and keep hearing honest answers.
Recorded asynchronously: Lukáš recorded his answers in Slovakia, and I recorded my questions separately.
Guest:
Lukáš Vartiak, Comenius University Bratislava
Email: lukas.vartiak@fses.uniba.sk
Profile: https://fses.uniba.sk/pracoviska/ustavy/ustav-mediamatiky/pracovnici/lukas-vartiak/
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lukas-Vartiak
Academia: https://comeniusuniversity.academia.edu/Luk%C3%A1%C5%A1Vartiak
Read the paper (open access): Human resource management and the economic value of social CSR: employee perceptions in a Slovak manufacturing firm (Interpersona, 2026): https://doi.org/10.54899/ijpr.v20i1.805
Chapters:
00:00 Intro: when a company says it cares, how do workers know?
03:44 Before the paper: from the document to the working day
05:26 What had to be given up: patterns, not causes
07:28 Why one single company
09:36 Getting into the firm: 51 answers out of 115
11:35 Four authors, one framing
13:40 What «I don’t know» really means
15:31 What comes next: following factories over time
18:32 Advice for the next five years: trust
20:48 Outro: four ideas to take away
More: https://horacio-ps.com/en/principal-english
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