This paper studies the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Literature offers different definitions of it. Also, companies’ actions to promote CSR have been researched variously. Typically, the previous research has addressed either the management approaches to CSR or external manifestations of CSR, such as CSR reports or stakeholder communication. Although employees are key stakeholders in the CSR work, little research has been conducted to address employees’ perception of CSR. This paper addresses this research gap with the research question of how employees define CSR. The data was gathered of two Finnish companies that actively promote CSR. Altogether 58 qualitative interviews were conducted in these two firms. Our results show that employees use all three aspects of CSR, economic, environmental and social, to describe the content of CSR. However, the different aspects receive different emphasis by each employee and in each company. The main contribution of our research lies with the realization that employees do not share the wide all-encompassing, literature definition of CSR but define the CSR based on their work tasks and personal experiences.