Background: Organizations play a key role in shaping a sustainable future and addressing societal and environmental challenges, which leads them to increasingly integrate Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices into their operations. Although businesses have realized the importance of CSR initiatives, their actual implementation often lags behind. Hereby, CSR communication is an essential component of CSR implementation. While the CSR communication literature mainly focuses on external stakeholders, the importance of employees is neglected. However, they constitute a crucial part of CSR implementation and thus, their engagement is vital for the full implementation of CSR initiatives.

Purpose: This research aims to explore the sensemaking processes and the influence of internal CSR communication on employee engagement for CSR implementation.

Method: To fulfil our research purpose, a qualitative single case study was conducted with an industrial organization. The case study was designed with an exploratory purpose, following a nominalist ontology and strong social constructionist epistemology. All in all, 13 semi-structured interviews were conducted. This allowed us to deepen our understanding of the topic, and ultimately develop two theoretical frameworks based on our findings.

Conclusion: The results show that employees make sense of internal CSR in different ways and to varying degrees, thereby passing through the stages of receiving information, familiarization and assessing interest, reflection, and social interaction. Also, the three internal CSR communication strategies influence employee engagement differently. As such, two-way symmetrical communication has the greatest potential to influence employee engagement, followed by two-way asymmetrical communication. On the contrary, one-way communication holds the lowest potential. These differences can be traced back to the identified employee engagement factors, which are mindset, feelings, and behavior.