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:

• Fairtrade International: Fairtrade certification ensures that workers are paid a fair wage, have safe working conditions, and are not subject to discrimination or forced labor.
  
• Rain Forest Alliance: Rain Forest Alliance certification ensures that products are produced in a way that protects the environment and supports the communities where they are grown.
  
• B Corporation: B Corporation certification is awarded to companies that meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. B Corporations are committed to using business as a force for good and creating value for all stakeholders, not just shareholders.
  
• Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS): GOTS is a certification program that sets standards for organic textiles, including cotton, wool and silk. GOTS certification ensures that textiles are made in an environmentally and socially responsible way, from the growing of the raw materials to the final product.
  
• Forest Stewardship Council (FSC): FSC is a certification program that promotes responsible forest management and ensures that products made from wood and paper come from sustainable and responsibly managed forests.
  
• Social Accountability International (SAI): SAI is a certification program that focuses on improving working conditions and promoting social responsibility in the workplace. SAI certification covers a wide range of industries, including apparel, electronics, and food and beverage.

Of course, all certification schemes have limitations. They may not cover all aspects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and will sometimes fail to ensure full compliance, for example. Nevertheless, there’s little doubt that purchasing CSR certified products is step in the right direction toward creating a just and sustainable global economy.

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:

• Operating without a plan. Effective disaster response starts well before disaster strikes in the form of a plan. For guidance on developing one, see a prior post.
  
• Making unhelpful donations. Donating the wrong in-kind products or volunteer help can do more damage than good by taking up valuable time in those delivering assistance. Donate only what respected organizations suggest and remember that the most effective donation immediately after a disaster is almost always cash.
  
• Overpromising. Minimize the risk of good intentions leading to promises that your company can’t keep by committing only what you’ve establish as feasible (ideally in the disaster response plan, per bullet one).
  
• Short-termism. Disaster recovery lasts years. The most effective assistance, therefore, does as well.

In summary, whether your company is responding to earthquakes in Europe, floods in South America or famine in Africa, try to start with a plan, donate what is known to be helpful, commit only what you can deliver and remain involved long-term. These tips will help your companies CSR be truly helpful. As always, feel free to contact us for further assistance.

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:

• Yes! Involving 40% of employees in external volunteering (as opposed to internal engagement such as employee resource groups) annually is excellent. The Civic 50 Colorado involve, on average, 34% and the Civic 50 US involve 22% of employees in external volunteering. Additionally, Civic 50 Colorado involve 58% and the Civic 50 US involve 45% of employees in volunteer efforts that are part of the company’s internally oriented community engagement (e.g., employee resource groups, company-sponsored issue education, training and awareness building).
• No, it doesn’t appear essential to offer volunteer grants for a CSR program to reach excellence. Forty-six percent of Civic 50 Colorado and 32% of Civic 50 US companies don’t offer volunteer grants.
• Yes, presenting on community engagement to the company’s board is a best practice applied by 62% of Civic 50 Colorado and 90% Civic 50 US companies.

​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:
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1. Recruiting and hiring: A high-impact DEI practice is to implement targeted recruitment and hiring strategies. This may include actively recruiting from underrepresented groups, such as women, people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community. It might even involve blind hiring practices, which remove identifying information from resumes, to reduce bias in the hiring process.
2. Employee resource groups (ERGs): ERGs can be effective at providing support, resources and a better workplace experience to underrepresented groups of employees. They are typically organized around a particular identity or affinity, such as race, gender, or sexual orientation. They provide a platform for employees to connect with others who share similar experiences and advocate for issues that are important to them.
3. Training and education: Consider providing personal and professional development to employees that helps them understand and appreciate the benefits of diversity and create an inclusive work environment. This can include workshops, seminars and webinars on unconscious bias, cultural sensitivity and microaggressions.
4. Policies and procedures revision: Many existing policies and procedures undermine DEI and, thus, require revisions. This can include updating codes of conduct, anti-discrimination policies and performance evaluations procedures.
5. Metrics and accountability: It’s never too early to establish DEI goals, associated targets and tracking metrics. Common goals include diverse representation at top levels of the organization, diversity of new hires and retention of minority employees.

We hope the above options spur ideas on where to start, or proceed with, your DEI efforts. As always, feel free to contact us for assistance.

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:

1. Team member involvement in CSR. Increasingly, employees want their work to make a meaningful contribution on others or society, or to promote social purpose, per research.
2. Disaster response. Climate change is making natural disasters, including fires and floods, more frequent and grave. Companies, therefore, will likely be expected to intensify their disaster response efforts. Learn more in a prior post.
3. Workplace inclusion. Survey research finds that workers are more likely to accept a job and promote their employer to others if the workplace is inclusive. In other words, managing inclusively is a highly important CSR element to the functioning of a business.
   

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)

​     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:

• Employees. Your first responsibility is to your employees. How will you treat pay, leave and other issues affecting employees stricken by disasters? Do you want to support such employees with monetary assistance? Will these be loans or gifts? Can employees support other employees? Have you considered the tax implications? How will you facilitate employee disaster relief contributions of money or time? CVS Health, for example, includes the following language in its disaster response policy:

"At CVS Health, our employees can support each other by donating to our Employee Relief Fund, a public charity designed to help CVS Health employees during unanticipated and unavoidable financial hardships and emergencies. Funded by employee contributions through payroll deduction and an initial donation from CVS Health, our Employee Relief Fund provides short-term, immediate financial relief to employees who’ve suffered significant hardship as a result of a natural disaster, family death, medical emergency or other unforeseen designated events."

• Customer and business partners. Your second responsibility is to your customers and business partners. Might customers affected by disasters benefit from a due-date extension? A dedicated support line? In-kind product? Do you have retailers or suppliers that need help re-establishing operations? MassMutual’s policy, for example, includes this language:

"MassMutual’s disaster relief and servicing guidelines help ensure that policyowners and clients in impacted areas have service and product options available to them when natural disasters occur. These may include extended grace periods, lost policy assistance, address change support, and various policy and plan provisions. For more information, click here or call our Customer Service Center at (800) 272-2216 with questions about insurance policies and annuities, or call (800) 743-5274 with questions about retirement plans."

• Community. Your third disaster response responsibility is to victims other than employees, customers and business partners. This also requires responding to many questions. What qualifies as a disaster? Does it need to be a presidentially declared? What if it’s in Mexico or Thailand? How will you assist victims? Which nonprofit organizations will you partner with? An example of a disaster response policy oriented toward the community is PetSmart’s:

​​​"We're here to help in the event of a natural or man-made disaster. In case of an emergency, funds are available to assist during the rescue, relief, and/or recovery stages for qualifying organizations seeking to assist more than 20 companion pets impacted by the disaster."

Looking for additional assistance in crafting your disaster response practice? Contact us!

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