Ever wonder if there’s a simple action your company can take to combat child labor, modern day slavery and other workplace human rights abuses in developing countries? Good news! There is.
You can shift your corporate purchasing to products are certified to be free of human rights abuses by third parties. These certifications provide independent verification that products have been produced in compliance with certain social and environmental standards. By purchasing certified products you will move from perpetuating existing human rights abuses to combatting them. Following are the principal bodies that certify products:
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Pro bono service – also known as pro bono work, pro bono volunteering or skill-based volunteering – is the provision of professional or technical services to social-purpose organizations or individuals free of charge. The best-known model of pro bono service is offering the professional services a company sells, such as legal counsel, free of charge. There are, however, many other pro bono models, including:
Project-based team engagement In project-based team engagement, teams of employees deliver a standard deliverable to nonprofit partners, such as a website redesign or strategic plan development, over a few weeks or months. For example, SAP has a program in which teams of employees spend a week working full time with a Black-owned business on business development and related topics and five weeks working at part time. Serve-a-thons In serva-a-thons, programmers, designers or other specialists collaborate intensively during one or several days to create solutions for nonprofit organizations or charitable causes, such as a new app or refreshed website. Cisco’s “Hack for Good,” for example, develops apps, products or other innovative solutions for nonprofits over a period of time lasting no more than a few days. Board service Board service involves employees serving on the board of directors of a nonprofit. For example, Unilever’s "The Compass" program invites all employees to serve on nonprofit boards, either individually or in teams, and trains and provides other support to those who sign up. Service sabbaticals A service sabbatical is when an employee takes a leave of absence from their job to serve full time at a nonprofit, typically for one to twelve months. Patagonia, for example, offers employees a two-month paid sabbatical to support an environmental nonprofit. In summary, whatever your company is, there’s likely a suitable way for it to engage in pro bono service. To learn more, contact us! A standard element in a company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) is disaster response. Disaster response varies in helpfulness, though. Fortunately, experts suggest that avoiding a few common mistakes will help ensure that your company’s disaster response is truly helpful:
Being a corporate social responsibility (CSR) professional involves answering many questions. Is involving 40% of employees in volunteering good? Is it vital to offer volunteer grants (making monetary contributions to the organizations where employee have volunteered)? Should community engagement be discussed at the company board level?
Good news! We just published a report on how the Civic 50 Colorado and the Civic 50 US, companies honored for their exceptional community involvement at the state and national levels, answer these and many other questions. The Civic 50 Colorado 2022 Report presents dozens of CSR data points over the last four years. These quantitative benchmarks from the best performers in CSR can help CSR professionals find answers to their questions. For example, the Civic 50 honorees answers to the above questions follow:
Have other CSR questions? Download the free The Civic 50 Colorado 2022 Report! As always, feel free to contact us for assistance with your CSR. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) refers to creating and maintaining a workplace environment that values and respects the differences among employees, provides all employees a sense of belonging and promotes equal opportunities for all. While a successful DEI program is a sophisticated endeavor that typically takes years to build, following are five productive places to start your DEI journey:
No one can predict the future, but a review of the recent past suggests the following three corporate social responsibility (CSR) topics are likely to be highly important in 2023:
In summary, whatever your 2023 CSR plans, try to have them give proper consideration to employee involvement in CSR, disaster response and workplace inclusion. Want assistance planning your 2023 CSR strategy? Contact us! This year, which Colorado’s companies have performed best in created a culture of service and dedicating themselves to building a better tomorrow? The answer, according to our Civic 50 Colorado award program, is:
Collectively, the Civic 50 Colorado donated to Colorado causes over $80 million in combined monetary and in-kind giving and over 160,000 employee volunteer hours. They also promoted community engagement through workplace diversity, equity and inclusion programs (98% offer this), formal practices to support voting and related actions (98%), employee paid time off to volunteer (80% offer this) and other efforts.
The Civic 50 Colorado assessment criteria are modeled on the national Points of Light Civic 50 award. Companies are rated based entirely on responses to numerical and categorical questions normalized by number of employees when relevant (to ensure size does not provide an advantage). Each applicant receives up to a possible 1,000 points in each community engagement dimension: investment, integration, institutionalization and impact. The 50 applicants with the highest total score are awarded Civic 50 Colorado honors. Human judging is not part of the determination. In 2022, companies with Colorado operations, community engagement programs and a minimum of 15 employees in Colorado were eligible to apply. Congrats to the 2022 Civic 50 honorees! Learn more about the Civic 50 Colorado and stay tuned for the quantitative report (or see the 2021 report) Excerpt from Do Good at Work: How Simple Acts of Social Purpose Drive Success and Wellbeing by Bea Boccalandro During one particular week in each of the last ten years, the New York Yankees won, on average, 74 percent of games. If you’re not as embarrassingly infatuated with baseball as I am, you might not realize this is astonishing. It easily beats their 57 percent winning average during that decade. In fact, it beats every major league team’s winning percentage back to 1954. The Yankees are at home during the week in question, but homefield advantage doesn’t explain their success. The average winning percentage during that week is still 10 percentage points higher than the decade’s homefield winning percentage (74 percent versus 64 percent).i What, then, explains this week’s outrageous success? (No, fellow Red Sox fans, it’s not that the Yankees are trouncing our team.)
The Yankees’ exceptional record during this one week is likely due to what’s at the top of the Hierarchy of Motivation. Psychologists call it “eudaimonic purpose.” Because I almost pulled a muscle trying to pronounce that word, I use a synonym: “social,” as in relating to societal good. Social—or eudaimonic—purpose is pursuing meaningful contributions to others or to a societal cause. Helping low-income families access the beach is an act of social purpose. Attaining a pay raise, upgrading our job to better match our passions or otherwise pursuing what’s on the bottom two levels of the Hierarchy of Motivation are self-oriented acts, what scientists call “hedonic” purpose. The winning week is Yankees Helping Others Persevere & Excel (HOPE) Week. During this one week per season, players take field trips with individuals and families facing hardship. One year, for example, relief pitcher Dellin Betances and several teammates spent a day at the Bronx Zoo with an eleven-year-old boy fighting leukemia and his seven-year-old sister who donated bone marrow to her brother. When Betances did his job from the mound at Yankees stadium that evening, he didn’t give up a single hit. It’s likely that social purpose helped him succeed. As covered earlier, in certain rare circumstances pay can motivate. Furthermore, pursuing passion, people and progress motivate across a broader set of circumstances and more effectively than pay. But all these hedonic pursuits are to social-purpose pursuits what a jeep is to a jet. We don’t progress as fast or as far when fueled by hedonic pursuits as opposed to social purpose. One study, for example, compared workers who were told their work helped charitable causes with workers in identical jobs who weren’t told this. Those who knew they were pursuing social purpose conducted equally high-quality work as those who didn’t but were 24 percent faster and had 43 percent less downtime. Another experiment studied workers scanning online images for specific patterns. One randomly selected subgroup was told that they were labeling tumor cells to assist medical researchers. The others were not given any context about the work. As in the case of the first experiment, workers who knew they were supporting the health of others processed more images than those who had no reason to believe their work promoted social purpose. In this case, however, there was a difference in quality. Despite producing more, the social-purpose workers had higher quality work. Other research uncovered that the social-purpose performance boost is so evident that supervisors notice it. Simply put, social purpose is our most powerful motivator. Social purpose not only increases motivation and performance, it also makes us happier with our jobs. My research documented 13 percent higher job satisfaction, on average, in employees whose work experience incorporated social purpose than in those whose work didn’t. Other studies reached similar conclusions. The Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen found that lack of workplace purpose is the biggest culprit in job dissatisfaction among Danes. Another European study found that incorporating social purpose into work boosted job satisfaction within a month. In fact, so many studies link social purpose to job satisfaction that researchers who systematically reviewed all the evidence say the relationship is indisputable. Want assistance igniting a sense of purpose in your team members? Contact us! For the first mention of this phenomenon, see Anthony Rieber, “Why Yankees Have a Higher Winning Percentage During HOPE Week,” Newsday, May 27, 2017. The statistics presented herein replicate Rieber’s analysis for a slightly newer decade: from 2009 to 2018. Pandemics, wildfires and other major disasters are now a business responsibility. The media reports which brands are contributing what, workers ask employers for ways to help and affected communities take note of which businesses are sensitive to their plight.
What’s a business leader to do? The most important step is to set up a response policy before disaster strikes. You don’t want to be caught making decisions ad hoc as homes burn or people fall ill. In crafting a disaster response policy, the most important considerations are:
Looking for additional assistance in crafting your disaster response practice? Contact us! Image from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Inclusion & Belonging Guidebook Did you know that research finds that in the United States a resume with a white-sounding name is more likely to receive a callback than the same resume with an African-American sounding name? Whether we’re aware of it or not, many of our workplaces perpetuate social injustices — via both conscious and unconscious behaviors. Therefore, a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) program that, among other things, minimizes racial inequity is vital to any corporate social responsibility (CSR) effort.
A key question you might be asking is: How can I, a non-expert in DEI, promote racial equity at my company? Whether you’re an entrepreneur managing a team of two or a Fortune 500 vice president, a new W.K. Kellogg Foundation product will help you answer this question. This free resource, the Inclusion & Belonging Guidebook, summarizes key DEI concepts, ideas, examples and tactics from a wide variety of sources. Where does it suggest you start? With yourself. In fact, the Guidebook, will help you progress both in your personal social justice journey as well as in your organizational DEI leadership. In summary, if you aren’t sure what next step to take in your DEI efforts, consider exploring the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Inclusion & Belonging Guidebook. For additional assistance with your DEI experts, contact us. We’re always eager to support your DEI and CSR efforts |
AuthorsSpark the Change Colorado, Community Shares of Colorado, B:CIVIC Archives
March 2023
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