Empower the Next Generation

Eleven-year-old Ravi and his 10-year-old sister, Shalinee, live with their three siblings in the small village of Mamura in India. With their father working odd jobs for a daily wage and their mother disabled, their family barely covers its basic needs. To supplement the family’s meager earnings, Ravi became a rag-picker, delving into piles of trash and searching for objects to sell. Attending school was far too expensive, so Shalinee spent her days at home, looking after her younger siblings.

That is, until Kronos stepped in. In 2015, we opened the Kronos Noida Learning Center in nearby Noida, India, not far from one of our facilities in India. The learning center’s mission: support the education and healthy development of underprivileged children in the local area. Ravi and Shalinee began coming to the center in 2016, receiving free uniforms, instruction in academic subjects, life-skills training, personal counseling, and healthy snacks to supplement their diets. Over a period of months, the siblings made significant academic progress and improved their communication skills. Instead of rag-picking, they are doing what kids everywhere should do—attending school and preparing for the future.

The Kronos Noida Learning Center is one of many projects we fund as part of our GiveInspired corporate social responsibility program. We organize our giving around a specific cause that we’ve found especially relevant when it comes to engagement: empowering the next-generation workforce. Our primary focus is to encourage the advancement of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) skills required of tomorrow’s workforce. We’ve done that by supporting an array of career and educational programs for youth.

I’ve long believed that businesses have a moral responsibility to help train the next generation of employees. But empowering the next generation also helps mobilize the current workforce. What is more inspiring for employees than knowing they’ve had a hand in helping a young person to thrive? Instead of merely donating money, we take an active role, supporting youth by bringing them into Kronos in a number of capacities. Employees love it, as they gain exposure to new ideas and feel more energy and dynamism among their teams.

In Chapter 6, I talked about how important it is to inject fun into your culture. Who loves working in a place that isn’t fun? A similar point holds true for youthfulness. Who wants to work in a place that seems old, stuck in its ways, aloof, unchanging? By nurturing the next generation workforce, we make our culture feel spirited and dynamic, complementing the impact of other cultural elements like our cutting-edge workplaces and our strong emphasis on innovation. Nurturing youth also allows us to give back to society, making Kronites proud. Engagement soars, taking our business with it.

ENGAGING EMPLOYEES THROUGH CORPORATE GIVING

Our emphasis on empowering the next generation has been a relatively recent development. For most of our company’s history, we allocated funds to an array of local and national charities. We tended to spread ourselves too thin, making small, haphazard donations in response to requests from nonprofits that approached us. As a result, we supported a miscellany of groups and causes, including golf tournaments and local associations and events. We also didn’t stay in touch with the charities to which we donated, so we weren’t certain of the impact our dollars were having.

At around the time we were codifying our core competencies, a group of us sat in a budget meeting and posed several long-overdue questions: Why was our corporate giving so piecemeal and disorganized? Why weren’t we pursuing philanthropy in ways that align with our company’s core purpose (helping organizations effectively manage their workforces)? Our queries prompted a spirited dialogue, which in turn led to a coherent vision for our corporate giving program: “To support the next-generation workforce in the communities where we work and live.”

We gave our newly formalized corporate giving program a name—GiveInspired, a sub-brand of WorkInspired—to align it formally with our culture. From there, we developed criteria for vetting the many requests for philanthropic gifts that we received. First and foremost, we’d give to local, national, and international organizations that helped youth prepare for future jobs and careers. Second, we’d give to local organizations that served communities where we operate, mainly but not exclusively in the arena of education and youth. Third, in keeping with our ethic of caring for people, we also decided to support organizations that helped communities respond to disasters. And fourth, we would fund additional initiatives that somehow helped our customers or the Kronos brand. To administer our annual budget, we formed an internal corporate giving committee, which drew from a cross-section of employees and managers. It wouldn’t be me or other senior leaders who’d dictate our giving—it would be Kronites themselves.

In the years that our GiveInspired corporate giving committee has existed, we’ve donated to an array of programs around the world that support youth and their careers. In the local area surrounding our corporate headquarters, for instance, we now support summer programs for 2,500 youth through the United Way, as well as programs through the local chapter of the Boys & Girls Clubs. To enhance the impact of our charitable giving, we’ve also begun making active, unsolicited grants, a practice that allows us to forge long-term partnerships and measure the impact of our giving more closely. As an example, we’ve worked with the University of Massachusetts at Lowell (UMass Lowell), whose campus is located near our corporate headquarters, to create a suite of programming. Our Kronos Scholars Co-Op program now brings students at the university to Kronos for a six-month learning experience each year. At the end of the program, we give each student a scholarship, and we offer the best and brightest among them permanent jobs at Kronos if we have relevant openings. To date, over 70 students have gone through the program, and many have been hired as Kronites.

Another organization we’ve helped on an ongoing basis through grant-making is United Teen Equality Center (UTEC), a group that engages at-risk youth and helps them to “trade violence and poverty for social and economic success.”¹ To date, UTEC’s unique approach has had an astonishing record of success, combining aggressive outreach to at-risk youth with mentoring, skills training, and work opportunities. In the state of Massachusetts, over half of young adults who have been incarcerated are rearrested within a year. But of the young people who enrolled in UTEC in 2017, 89 percent stayed out of trouble, and almost all (99 percent) had no new criminal convictions on their records. A full 83 percent of the organization’s graduates are currently employed. By helping to support UTEC, Kronos empowers students and elevates the quality of life in our local community.

Offering financial support is only one part of philanthropy at Kronos. We don’t just want our employees to witness the organization empowering the next-generation workforce. We want them to have the opportunity to volunteer their time, so that the spirit of helping youth and of giving becomes part of the fabric of our culture. We strongly encourage Kronites to take on charitable projects individually and with their teams, including those unrelated to the next-generation workforce. In addition, we formally encourage Kronites to leverage our open time off policy to volunteer for causes they find meaningful. Although Kronites and their teams can select any cause, many of them do choose those that help empower the next generation workforce. At our Noida, India, office, Kronites volunteer regularly at the school we support there. As Ashok, head of our Noida operation, relates, employees “are like buddies to these children at the center and go on weekends. . . . This close relationship has helped the children get a larger purview of the world and has inspired them to work hard in redefining their future.”

As you might expect, participation with this project and related ones has also helped Kronites feel more connected to our company. As part of our annual employee engagement survey, we ask employees to rate their happiness with our corporate social responsibility initiatives. Over a three-year period, that score has swung dramatically upward in our Noida location, moving from 73 percent (i.e., 73 percent of Kronites in Noida gave our corporate social responsibility programs one of the top two possible ratings) to 96 percent. As Kronites tell us, volunteering with the children is a deeply meaningful, almost spiritual experience for them. “Everyone wishes to relive their childhood,” one Noida-based Kronite relates. “[The Kronos Noida Learning Center] gives me a chance to do so. Every time you visit, you are refueled with so much happiness, optimism, and fun. I volunteer because it continuously teaches me something new about people, about cooperation, compassion, and about myself.” Another Kronite says: “Spending time with the children is an integral part of my Kronos experience.”

Kronites elsewhere have had similar experiences—and feel more excited about Kronos and their jobs—thanks to the time they spend volunteering. In Sydney, Australia, Kronites brought Christmas gifts to at-risk women, partnering with an organization that aims to empower and enable these women to make real changes in their lives. “Such a humbling experience,” one Kronite wrote on our internal collaboration platform. Another wrote: “A very rewarding experience indeed. What a way to spend a day! I am very thankful to Kronos for providing such an opportunity.” One Kronite used myTime to participate in a bike charity ride benefiting the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, an educational organization in the Middle East that brings youth together from different cultures around environmental issues. As this Kronite wrote, he originally was somewhat skeptical about the institute and its work. Could it really help these youth bridge their differences? “But when I saw all those students from Israel, Jordan, and Palestine, and other countries studying, working, and living together, trying to build up the trust between [such] different cultures, my skepticism was broken. My experience . . . was eye and heart opening, and I see it now as a beacon of hope in the Middle East.”

Experiences helping the younger generation are so powerful that they often stay with Kronites for years afterward. One of our senior leaders, Barb, recalls how about a decade ago our sales group assembled bicycles in small groups as a team-building exercise. What team members didn’t realize was that at the conclusion of the event, about 100 children would arrive in person to claim these bikes as donations. “People were moved to tears,” Barb says. In her view, experiences like this have made a “huge” impression on her team members. Even today, she says, employees and managers still talk about the bicycle-assembly event, as well as numerous other volunteer experiences they’ve had at Kronos.

INTERNS, INTERNS EVERYWHERE

Beyond our charitable efforts, we’ve supported the next-generation workforce—and helped engage our own—by actively training young people ourselves. In addition to our Kronos Scholars Co-Op program, our annual summer internship program allows college students from around the globe to further their interest in STEM and the world of business by working a stint at Kronos.

We give interns real assignments to work on, not the typical busywork. Consider the experience of Meaghan, an intern with visual impairments. For years, we’ve worked on making our software more accessible for the visually impaired, but we weren’t sure how much progress we were really making. To test our web and mobile applications, we recruited Meaghan to carefully assess our software and provide thoughtful feedback. Thanks to her input, we’ve made significant changes in our product, such as making it possible for blind employees to review and approve their timecard on a mobile device using a screen reader that vocalizes the user interface, or allowing people with other visual impairments to see their schedule in high contrast without relying on color codes. By engaging directly with our software developers, Meaghan helped infuse an awareness and empathy into our products, not only improving the user experience for people with disabilities, but usability in general.

Preparing the next-generation workforce means helping them build real skills and understand how meaningful and important work can—and should—be. And if our interns do real work, and if, like Meaghan, they make real contributions to Kronos, they should also receive above-market wages. We pay interns more in part because we want to attract the best and the brightest, in hopes that we might recruit some of them to become new Kronites (we wind up hiring about 15 to 20 percent of them).

Our internship program represents a significant investment on our part, but it’s worth it—to the students and to us. Each year, we receive thousands of applications for about 100 spots. Interns post positive reviews of the program and our culture on job websites. As one wrote, “Internships here are absolutely amazing! We do real impactful work rather than administration and irrelevant, time-consuming tasks. We get to feel like what we bring to the table in regard to ideas, opinions, personality, etc. is valued and desired.”

As for our employees, they get a chance to impact the lives of students. Some who wish to advance into management roles get to “try on” being a manager by overseeing interns during the summer. One employee in our marketing department who had expressed interest in being a manager developed valuable skills managing interns during the summer. From there, we advanced her into our JumpStart training program for new managers. Nine months later, this employee had hired and was overseeing two full-time team members. Our internship program wasn’t pivotal in this Kronite’s advancement—that would have happened without it. But having these initial management experiences definitely helped.

MORE WAYS TO SUPPORT ENGAGEMENT AND EMPOWER THE NEXT GENERATION

Hopefully, my discussion so far has not only highlighted how empowering the next generation can support employee engagement, but also sparked some ideas as to how you might pursue this principle in your own team or organization. Here are some additional best practices:

Make It a “Real” Priority

One reason companies sometimes fail to engage employees around their charitable or social responsibility initiatives is that they send mixed messages. They tout the company’s commitment to particular social causes and encourage employees to get involved, but then they suggest—either implicitly or explicitly—that the company’s “real” priorities should take precedence. We’ve succeeded with GiveInspired because we make clear that empowering the next generation—and giving back to the community generally—is in fact a real priority for our company. Our leadership team gives charitable efforts visibility in meetings alongside our other strategic goals, and we participate in them ourselves, both inside and outside of work. With Kronites enthusiastically sharing their experiences with youth on our internal collaboration platform, with managers throughout the company encouraging and organizing charitable activity for their teams, and with young people a visible presence throughout our organization, empowering the next generation becomes far more than an organizational priority. It becomes an inextricable and endearing part of the culture.

Embed Charitable Efforts into the Work Itself

Why distinguish so firmly between your “real” work and nurturing the next generation? Throughout Kronos, managers look for opportunities to connect our business and charitable activities. Doing so further communicates how seriously we take our charitable mission, and it provides hugely meaningful experiences for employees and customers within the context of the workday. Instead of taking a team bowling to celebrate a win or to bring team members closer together, our managers sometimes take them out for a day to beautify a school’s grounds or deliver holiday gifts to needy children. Kronites love it. As one wrote after one such outing: “Personally, I’ve not been given this opportunity with [a] past employer and I felt it [was] an invaluable experience. I would recommend it to anyone. Not only does it bring you closer as a team but it gives you the opportunity to give back to your community.”

Mobilize the Other WorkInspired Principles

You can use the principles in this book individually to enhance engagement, but they gain power when you deploy many of them together. Conceptually, GiveInspired embodies our emphasis on caring for others. But our execution of this initiative brings together many principles we’ve covered. I’ve mentioned how we’ve encouraged Kronites to use myTime to volunteer for charitable causes. By supporting local charitable efforts in the communities where we operate, we also reinforce the principle of welcoming our global employees—letting them choose and participate in charitable efforts that matter to them. Likewise, by using our internship program as an opportunity for young Kronites to gain management experience, we help support the principle of giving all employees a great manager. In imagining how your team or organization might support youth, think back through the principles we’ve covered in this book. How might you incorporate them here?

Stay Disciplined

Once you create a structured program for empowering the next generation, it’s easy to slide back into a less disciplined approach, saying yes to charitable requests that seem worthy but don’t fit your mission. Stay focused. In 2015, a personal acquaintance of mine asked Kronos to support a national program of his that helped foster businesses started by entrepreneurs in underprivileged communities. It was a great cause, and it supported our mission of empowering the next generation workforce. Still, at the time the request came in, this program wasn’t operating in any of the local communities where we operated, so we declined to participate. A year later, my friend called again: the program was interested in expanding into Massachusetts’s Merrimack Valley, where our headquarters is located. Perfect! Since we had done our research and knew that this program was high quality, we committed to fund training for these entrepreneurs so that they could then pitch investors at a national convention.

Stay Engaged—for the Right Reasons

Many companies tout the vast sums of money they donate to charitable causes. It might make for good public relations, but simply pulling out a checkbook won’t get you far in terms of engagement. Ultimately, the success of GiveInspired has owed to the energy, time, and thought we’ve put into it. Employees need to see that the organization stands behind engaging the next generation workforce—that it’s connected to everything else the organization does, and that the programs you support are high quality and deliver real value. If they do, your efforts will translate most effectively into greater affection for the company. We don’t win awards for our charitable efforts because we write bigger checks, but because we make sure that every dollar we do spend makes the maximum difference, both for communities and for us.

MAKING A DIFFERENCE

One reason that empowering the next generation workforce resonates so strongly with us is that we see the incredible difference it makes in the lives of the younger generation that we help. We also see some of our own colleagues thriving in the workplace thanks to the helping hand they received at critical points in their lives. Kristina, one of our senior leaders, grew up in Hungary and emigrated to the United States via Austria and Canada. Through sheer determination and grit, she distinguished herself in her profession. But as she often points out, she didn’t do it alone. “I’ve been so lucky and blessed to meet amazing individuals along the way,” she says. “It’s not that they give you free money or a free lunch. They’re there for you, guiding you, coaching you, giving you advice and confidence along the way.”

Stories like these epitomize all that can happen when we take responsibility for empowering the next generation. And now, through our programs at Kronos, this senior leader and other Kronites can provide similar support to other young people. They can contribute to a culture that prioritizes giving back, and that connects charitable giving profoundly and consistently with the work we do for our customers. In a culture like that, how could you not love your job? How could you not show up every day determined to help your company and its customers succeed?