Two Reasons Why Your CSR Program Should Engage Employees

By Melanie Colburn

The phrase “employees are our greatest asset” seems to be a common platitude at CSR conferences and in annual reports. But corporate responsibility communications are often outwardly focused — aimed at the media, investors, customers; the external community. There is much to be gained by focusing that lens inward, but when it comes to resource allocation, employee communications and engagement is often low on the list. Here are two good reasons why your CR communications should aim to educate, inspire, and engage employees.

Cost Savings
The Corporate Leadership Council reports that companies that enjoy high engagement rates have 87 percent lower staff turnover rates and twenty percent better performance. Need another? A survey by Ipsos MORI found that seventy-five percent of employees with a favorable impression of their company’s CSR efforts plan to stay two years, compared to fifty percent for those with an unfavorable opinion.

In the technology space, median recruitment costs were over $4,000 in 2011, and can range much higher for business services and other industries. Multiply by several thousand employees worldwide and investment in employee engagement begins to look like a bargain. Sustainability-engaged employees are more satisfied two-to-one, according to a nationwide study by Rutgers University.

Employee Ambassadors
Customer relationships are often lorded over, cultivated and prized. But today, many customers are seeping through the seams — connecting with your company through mobile devices, social media and the web. Interconnection is powerful but not easy to control. Business models must respond to this by meeting the customer where they are, not where one might want them to be.

Embed CSR into the brand from the inside out and there’s a bottom line perk. Employees that viewed their employer as environmentally responsible were fifty percent more likely to recommend their company, according to a study by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. Communicate how your company supports an employee’s personal values and they’re more willing to carry your brand beyond the offices walls.

New Territory, Your Own Backyard
So if we recognize that employee engagement around corporate responsibility is valuable, why are so many companies stopping the presses at the sustainability report? Resources may be scarce, but it’s more than that. Media clippings can be counted, investor ratings provide a rank, and dollars are a customer’s ballot. But what do employees have to offer in terms of measurable results? Quantifiable goals can be deceptively comforting, making it easy to bias against or simply ignore areas in which it is challenging to show quarterly wins. Strategists might call those blind spots.

Even companies making great strides in social and environmental sustainability are struggling with this new territory — in other words, their “own backyard.” A recent roundtable hosted by the Environmental Defense Fund gathered sustainability professionals representing several leading companies across various industries, each with strong corporate responsibility commitments. The focus of the EDF event was to move thinking “beyond green teams” and toward embedding sustainability into people’s roles across the organization.

It is a bold vision. In many ways it embodies an ideal state of sustainability, one where triple bottom line values are so thoroughly adopted it is simply a given. Though this vision might appeal to you, stop for a second and consider how far your organization is from that idyllic.

Even leading companies at the forefront of many CSR efforts, like those present at the EDF roundtable, sometimes feel like novices in this area. There are no roadmaps and so few best in class case studies that it is premature to codify best practices. But they realize they can’t stop there. Employees and culture are just too important to the long-term enterprise of embedding sustainability throughout a company.

As practiced storytellers, CSR communicators have a special role to play in organizations at the ground stages of developing employee engagement around sustainability. Good communication is the core of engagement. Raters and rankers may only want the raw data, but employees need vivid and compelling episodes that provoke deeper reflection, response, and engagement.

If you’re not communicating your corporate responsibility in an authentic and compelling fashion to your internal audience, you are overlooking your “greatest asset” (they call it a truism for a reason). The most robust triple bottom line strategy lives beyond the walls of your presentation deck; it becomes the culture.

Melanie Colburn is part of the sustainability team at Autodesk, where she leads internal communications and employee engagement on sustainability. She has a degree with honors from the University of California at Berkeley and is pursuing an MBA in sustainable business at San Francisco State University. She has published in Mother Jones, GreenBiz.com, Reason magazine, and Hyphen magazine and contributed to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s Vision 2050 Pathway.

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author/ presenter and are not those of Autodesk, Inc., its officers, directors, subsidiaries, affiliates, business partners, or customers.