11
Employee engagement

This chapter outlines the methods for engaging your company’s employees in corporate responsibility to achieve tangible business benefits.

Passion is the genesis of genius (Tony Robbins).

While it may not be intuitive or obvious, one of the biggest benefits that the corporate responsibility department can deliver to a company is employee engagement. Most people entering this field are focused on the benefits that their work can produce for people and the planet, but not necessarily motivating and inspiring their fellow employees. As you will read in this chapter, there is a very strong case for employee engagement as being one of the primary value propositions for the corporate treehugger.

Let’s start by defining employee engagement. A human resources (HR) expert at AMD defined employee engagement as the “motivation to invest discretionary effort into work.” According to Scarlett Surveys: “Employee engagement is a measurable degree of an employee’s positive or negative emotional attachment to their job, colleagues and organization which profoundly influences their willingness to perform at work.”⁷⁸

You can boil all of this down into a simple statement: engagement is seeing your job as your cause. If your job is also your cause, you are naturally motivated to work hard. This is a view that most people who work in corporate responsibility can relate to because we are motivated by our altruism – our need to help people and the planet – and we have the good fortune to work for our cause.

The business value of employee engagement

There are reams of data that correlate employee engagement with business value:

• Companies with high engagement have three times the operating margin (profit) than companies with low engagement. In addition, 88% of fully engaged employees believe they can positively impact the quality of their organization’s products and services, while only 38% of disengaged employees feel the same way⁷⁹

• Organizations with more engaged employees have 2.6 times the earnings per share growth rate than organizations in the same industry whose employees are less engaged. Disengaged employees account for a loss of more than $300 billion in the productivity of the U.S. workforce⁸⁰

There are many more studies that support the connection between employee engagement and business results. Because employee engagement is directly correlated to business success, it is the raison d’être for many corporate HR departments. These departments track their engagement scores on a routine basis by using employee surveys and will often develop new programs to address any deficits in the data.

How corporate responsibility drives employee engagement

What does CR have to do with employee engagement? Going back to my shortened definition (seeing your job as a cause), and knowing that increasing numbers of people (especially younger workers) care deeply about sustainability, there is a natural linkage between sustainability and engagement. There are several studies that link sustainability to engagement:

• The PricewaterhouseCoopers 2009 study Managing Tomorrow’s People. Millennials at Work: Perspectives from a New Generation states that 88% of “millennials”⁸¹ seek employers with values that match their own and 86% would consider leaving an employer whose values no longer reflect theirs

• The 2010 Hewitt Associates study Engaging Employees through CSR showed a strong correlation between the level of engagement and the percentage of employees who believe that their organization is socially and environmentally responsible⁸²

• A 2008 study by Stanford Graduate School for Business surveyed 759 graduating MBAs at 11 top business schools; it showed that these future business leaders rank corporate social responsibility high on their list of values, and they are willing to sacrifice a significant part of their salaries to find an employer whose thinking is in sync with their own.⁸³ On average, these MBAs would give up a whopping 14.4% of their salary for a company that they perceived as a responsible corporate citizen

• In April 2011, the Society for Human Resource Management study, Advancing Sustainability: HR’s Role, compared several measures of engagement in companies with superior sustainability programs against those with poor sustainability programs. The study reported the following benefits for companies with more engaged employees:

– Employee morale: 55% improvement

– Business processes: 43% more efficient

– Public image: 43% stronger

– Employee loyalty: 38% increased⁸⁴

• In June 2011, Fortune magazine published a story titled “How Going Green Can Be a Boon to Corporate Recruiters,” which summarized a number of studies: Mercer research found that workers under 25 years old listed a company’s good reputation as fourth on the list of most important draw for a job, just under pay.⁸⁵ Buck Consultants reported that 49% of companies surveyed promoted their green agenda to attract environmentally conscious employees. Wayne Balta, IBM’s Vice President for Environmental Affairs was quoted in the article: “They’ve figured out that companies that are progressive and innovating in this area are themselves innovative”

You don’t have to be a genius to connect the dots here: engagement is about seeing work as a cause; sustainability is a cause for many people; therefore, great sustainability programs are correlated with superior employee engagement.

How to engage employees through corporate responsibility

With this model in mind, there is a clear business imperative to make sustainability a part of the work experience. The question is: how? Not everyone can work in the CR department (nor would they necessarily want to), but the data shows that current and potential employees are attracted to employers with outstanding sustainability and responsibility profiles. There are a number of ways that companies are engaging employees by integrating sustainability into their day jobs:

Green teams

Green teams are a growing trend with many companies (see Chapter 5 for a discussion on green teams). These are groups of employee volunteers that work together to improve the environment at work and in the local community. Green teams primarily focus on greening the work environment with activities that improve recycling, conserve energy, reduce cafeteria waste, and reduce commuting. Increasingly, these groups are taking on bigger challenges and responsibilities to the point where green teams are becoming a recognized organizational structure within some companies. Here are a few examples from company green teams that might spur some ideas for how you could work with your own company’s green team:

Outreach to customers

The eBay green team started in 2007 as a grassroots effort to green the workplace. They went from eliminating Styrofoam cups to prompting eBay to build a large solar array. Then they had an epiphany: Involve eBay customers. This is an excerpt from the eBay green team webpage:

As the world’s largest marketplace for used, refurbished and vintage goods, eBay’s biggest eco-friendly opportunity lies with its buyers and sellers – the millions of people that make up the eBay community worldwide. So in March 2009, we invited the eBay community of buyers and sellers to join in our green shopping efforts. After just six weeks, the Green Team was 100,000 members strong, and we’re still growing. (We’re pushing more than 225,000 now!) We want to harness the power of our community to help the world make smarter, greener shopping decisions. Join us in making a positive impact on the world (see: www.ebaygreenteam.com).

The exponential multiplier by engaging customers not only adds to the environmental impact of the eBay green team, but also enhances its brand reputation.

Dumpster days

To increase awareness about recycling, the employees at North Carolina-based Burt’s Bees flipped over their dumpsters in the parking lot and separated out all of the recyclable items. According to 3blmedia.com, the purpose of the event was to educate employees about waste reduction. Trash destined for the landfill was divided into items that should have been recycled but were not, and garbage. With about five tons of stockpiled trash dumped onto the parking lot, employees donned HAZMAT suits and dove in to find out what they could dig up. They saved approximately 2.8 tons of trash from landfills. And, according to GreenBiz.com, the lessons learned from the dumpster-diving experiment resulted in a 50% reduction in waste, saving the company around $25,000 annually.

Personal sustainability plans

Walmart is the world’s largest company with over 2 million employees (aka associates). This is how Walmart describes its employees’ personal sustainability plans (from Treehugger.com):

As sustainability has become a standard part of the next generation Walmart business model, our associates have begun making sustainability part of their daily lives. And they’re very passionate about it. That’s why we’ve introduced a new global program, My Sustainability Plan (MSP), to help engage and support our associates who want to choose an activity that will allow them to become more sustainable.

Associates can choose as many goals as they like and track their progress online. In the US, they can visit our internal social networking site, mywalmart.com, to select and track their goals. This allows associates to connect with colleagues to provide encouragement and inspiration, or even spark some spirited competition among friends, stores, or even entire divisions. In addition, this format allows everyone to understand how their individual actions – when combined with those of their 2 million colleagues – add up to make a world of difference.

Biofeedback for buildings

At AMD, the new Lone Star campus in Austin, Texas is LEED Gold certified. While this certification means that the design features are among the greenest in the country, it does not guarantee that the operations of the building are also green. Enter the AMD green team. Like other green teams, these dedicated volunteers are working on campus-greening issues ranging from composting cafeteria waste to commuting alternatives. With the support of the facilities group, the green team (and others) recently got a new and powerful tool to manage onsite energy use: SmarteBuilding.com. This technology allows for real-time feedback of the energy use in buildings down to a small cluster of offices. You can watch the total energy use for your area and break it down by plugs, lights, and building temperature. Armed with this technology, the AMD green team is planning an “energy night out” to find out what energy-consuming equipment is left on when people leave the office. They are also working on ideas for setting up energy conservation competitions among various teams.

Environmental excellence awards

As discussed in Chapter 5, recognizing employees for their environmental protection efforts is a successful strategy for driving environmental improvements. This kind of recognition can also be an effective means for improving employee engagement.

When I first introduced this award at Intel, many of the nominations were for personal actions that had an environmental benefit, such as carpooling or recycling. As employees started to see the value that the company ascribed to these accomplishments, we started to get nominations for larger changes like improvements to business or manufacturing processes. We realized that this award had motivated a hidden army of eco-minded employees who had incorporated environmental improvements into their day jobs. While we did not measure their levels of employee engagement, it was fairly obvious that everyone involved in the process was excited about lightening the company’s environmental footprint and took great pride in the recognition. To further bolster the employee engagement value of this process, I turned the management of the award over to the Intel green team (with funding and oversight from my group) and it became one of their top priorities.

Skill-based volunteering

This is an idea that has become a hot topic in the world of employee volunteerism. The concept is to match an employee’s skill set and/or development needs to a volunteer opportunity. There are a number of groups that have this concept at the heart of their business model (e.g., yourcause.com and angelpoints.com). The HandsOn Network describes the concept this way: “Connecting the volunteer with the right skills to the right project at the right time will allow getting a greater impact and building stronger relationships between volunteers and the nonprofit sector.”⁸⁶

An essential element of this kind of volunteering is the matching system. Your company will need a way to identify the core skills of volunteers and match them with the skill needs of qualified nonprofit partners. Skills-based volunteerism is the perfect marriage between your HR department and the community affairs department. HR wants to see employees developing their skills and becoming engaged through volunteerism. The community affairs team wants to increase employee volunteering. By matching employees’ skills to nonprofit needs, this method of organizing your volunteer program can benefit both.

Micro-volunteering

The number one reason people do not volunteer for a cause while at work is they do not have enough time. If you think about the typical volunteer experience, it does not fit nicely into a busy workday. Most people have multiple meetings and commitments on their calendar every day and, while they may want to get involved, they have not been able to free up a large enough chunk of time to make it happen. Enter the concept of micro-volunteering. It turns out that most people do have enough time to volunteer, but it is just cut up into small chunks.

A company called Sparked (sparked.com) has figured out a way to take advantage of these smaller chunks of time with an online application that matches employees’ skills with nonprofit needs in an online environment. For example, if a nonprofit needs assistance with its marketing plan, it can post this need on the sparked.com system, which will match the need with participating company employees that have marketing skills. Instead of updating their Facebook page between meetings, these employees can log on sparked.com and help out a nonprofit with their marketing plans, brand image, copywriting, operations, Web design, and a host of other jobs. Because this can all be done from their desk, it is far more efficient and attractive to busy people. The system also allows all of the engagements to be tracked and monitored.

Micro-volunteering may get more employees involved in a cause, but it needs to be measured differently than traditional volunteering. The primary volunteerism metric is the number of hours invested in volunteer activities. Representatives from Sparked told me that the average duration of an engagement on their site is seven minutes. So, it is not likely that your volunteer hours will rise significantly by using this method. But, by counting the number of employees involved as a primary metric, you might find a significant increase in volunteerism, and thus engagement, by using this tool. While it will not replace the need for “hands-on” volunteers, this approach has the potential to rewrite the rules for skill-based employee volunteerism. The quote from National Public Radio on the Sparked website says it well: “crowdsourcing for the common good.”

Ultimately, the ability of your CR program to engage employees, ranging from the executive office to the rank and file, is a primary determinant of success and a significant element of your value proposition as a corporate treehugger. A theme that runs through this book is partnering for success. Successful employee engagement is dependent on solid partnerships with the departments that manage your company’s workforce. Depending on your company’s structure, you should reach out to the HR team, the community affairs team, or both. Seek first to understand their programs and plans before suggesting any enhancements around sustainability/corporate responsibility. Again, it is best if you are able to get these ideas embedded into the functions that have line management responsibility for employee engagement (typically HR or community affairs) and then serve as a catalyst and advisor.

When you do suggest new ways to engage employees through your sustainability programs, be prepared to put in the time to get a new program off the ground. In most cases, even if your partner organizations are supportive, they will not have the time or resources to implement new ideas immediately. In my experience, if you can invest enough time, energy, and resources to get a program to launch with some interest and excitement, there will be a line of people wanting to take control (and credit) for the concept. Like a start-up company that gets bought out by a larger company, spinning off successful programs should be viewed as success. It means that the concept worked and now has an institutional home that will keep it alive long after you have moved on to other issues.

Working on employee programs is the definition of a win–win endeavor: by effectively engaging the employees of your company in sustainability programs, you can unlock huge benefits for the environment while simultaneously returning significant business value for your company.⁸⁷