The engagement of CSR

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is an idea that has been bandied about for years, although many companies still struggle to gain internal traction in CSR projects. Karalyn Brown looks at the concept of engagement, the role of HR in CSR and how three companies successfully engaged their workforces in CSR initiatives

When a word like ‘engagement’ makes it into Don Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words, there’s more than a problem with misunderstanding and misquotation. It’s officially become jargon – a management word so overused, its true meaning is forgotten.

Unfortunately, the word engagement overpopulates too many HR and people management manuals. As HR practitioners, we acknowledge how essential it is when designing and selling policies. We talk always of gaining ‘buy in’ or ‘aligning’ the management team. But do we really understand the true meaning of engagement? More importantly, do we really understand how to achieve it?

Lack of engagement is easily spotted in a number of ways. A sea of folded arms on the rollout of a policy; a carefully constructed manual dying a dusty death at the bottom of an in-tray; or peers in management labelling an exciting new concept as ‘some HR thing’.

Defining engagement

To clear up the confusion let’s define engagement as “a personal state of authentic involvement, contribution and ownership”.

A policy engages a person or a team when they actively support it and promote it to others. Engaged employees may sell the idea of participation in a program just by their enthusiasm for it. They take ownership of the policy and its rollout then contribute ideas readily or without prompting. They may also be quick to sign up for any policy functions or activities. A policy engages an organisation when this behaviour occurs at many levels.

Why use CSR policies as examples of engagement?

In engaging organisational power brokers, champions of a corporate social responsibility (CSR) program can face greater challenges than promoters of other people policies.

An HR initiative, while removing staff from the frontline of the business and costing some dollars, often has identifiable, if not tangible business benefits such as an enthused and better trained workforce for example. Unlike HR, the concept of a corporation’s responsibility to the community is relatively new. Acceptance can be particularly difficult if the community partner has no direct connection with the corporate business at hand or the focus of an organisation is a lean bottom line. In some cases the benefits of a CSR policy may be less obvious and only apparent when the program has been in place for some time.

Introducing CSR at Cisco, Lend Lease and AGL

Cisco, Lend Lease and AGL are three very different organisations with one thing in common: they have successfully introduced CSR policies and achieved this through fully engaging the organisation.

Global IT services provider Cisco launched its program in partnership with the Smith Family. Property developer Lend Lease has a staff volunteer Community Day, now running globally. Energy provider AGL has recently introduced its ‘Energy for Life’ program, which encompasses employee volunteering, matched donations to a selection of approved charities, ‘Warmth in Winter’ where AGL pays the energy bills for shelters for the homeless, and ‘Energy Matters’ which uses energy efficiency know-how for the benefit of employees, customers and the community.

What do they do and how successful are they?

Cisco’s partnership with The Smith Family began in 2000. Since then Cisco has provided The Smith Family with a new internal voice and data network and a website for children on the ‘Learning for Life’ program. Cisco staff mentor and sponsor children on this program and are keen volunteers when The Smith Family calls on helpers for its functions.

As a result of the partnership, The Smith Family administration is now fully online and their volunteers able to work remotely from their laptops. According to Cisco’s national business development manager, Peter Scope, the relationship has transformed not only the way The Smith Family operates but also the way it plans for future activities. “The Smith Family now think like an intelligent techno savvy entity,” Scope believes.

Any program has achieved its intention if its success can be measured internally and externally. In 2001 the partnership won the Prime Minister’s Community Business Partnership Award. Internally, the program’s success has also provided the impetus for further community partnerships for Cisco. And evidence of staff engagement is obvious, when it takes only one email to organise 150 employees to pack Christmas hampers.

The Lend Lease Community Day is held across the company in the late winter months, with employees volunteering on projects as diverse as choral singing in nursing homes to mowing lawns for Garden Aid in Haberfield. Staff created a marketing plan for the Independent Theatre in North Sydney, cleaned houses and gardens and have painted and designed cubby houses for many of Sydney’s pre schools.

Community Day has been running for almost 10 years – more than 120,000 community hours all up. With consistently 60 per cent of staff participating in the day, Lend Lease Foundation manager Melissa Vieusseux sums it up in “we’ve done a lot of painting”.

In contrast, AGL recently launched its Energy for Life program. Last year with AGL’s help, employees raised $150,000 for charities ranging from Alzheimer’s Australia and CARE Australia to the RSPCA and the Garvan Institute. Warmth in Winter paid the energy bills for 93 homeless shelters in Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales, warming a total of 107,000 winter nights. And more than 200 employees took a paid work day to volunteer for projects as diverse as painting an RSPCA shelter and repairing a children’s playground to renovating accommodation facilities for disadvantaged youth and packing and selling bandannas.

What engages decision makers?

To gain any real traction the policy must simultaneously be driven from the top and supported from the bottom.

In promoting a policy the technique to sell it depends on the individual CEO and the company’s style and method of decision making. But, whatever the sales techniques used, senior management signing off must see that a policy has clear (and if possible measurable) business benefits. Obvious pluses are opportunities for company brand or relationship building, staff engagement, managing the external marketplace or providing a defining competitive edge. To gain management support the policy must also be thoroughly researched, any problems anticipated and solutions predefined, and of course, the timing must be right.

Decision makers must see that proposed community partners have sound governance, are well organised, culturally compatible and provide no conflict of interest.

In conceiving their CSR policy, senior management at Cisco realised that while they had clear responsibilities for business performance and market share, they also needed a strong social licence if their growth was to be sustainable. Support for the policy and The Smith Family, however, wasn’t immediately guaranteed on the basis that altruism is intrinsically worthy. The program also needed to make good business sense.

Cisco believed that their CSR program could be a physical expression of their values and act as a means of attracting and retaining the best people. According to Peter Scope, “the best employees are balanced and thoughtful and look beyond themselves”. And while honest management, job satisfaction and career development are important, the best staff also want to be engaged. “Employees want to build meaning and balance in their work and trust the company they work for. The Smith Family partnership is a demonstration of this trust,” he says.

Cisco management also identified other benefits of the partnership with The Smith Family. The opportunity to bring high profile partners on board and create loyalty in those relationships has enabled Cisco “to build strong relationships through involving our ecosystem of partners, both resellers and suppliers,”Scope says. Another side benefit, which wasn’t immediately obvious at the policy’s inception, was the opportunity to make strong connections with potential clients and contacts in a non-threatening non-sales environment.

The idea for the Lend Lease Community Day came from a suggestion to their foundation that employees volunteer in soup kitchens. Lend Lease identified numerous benefits in Community Day. As part of an employee benefit vehicle, it fulfils the charter of the Lend Lease Foundation to provide for staff, wellbeing and career development. From a business perspective, the day raises Lend Lease’s profile among a diverse community and provides an opportunity to unify the company across all business units.

Timing was important for AGL. The firm set up its community policy in response to the increasing public debate about corporate community responsibility. AGL saw its program as an opportunity to engage staff and contribute something to the community. In choosing Energy for Life, AGL’s most important consideration was the need for consistency with the firm’sculture, values and mission. Particularly important for selecting the Warmth in Winter and Energy Matters programs were an obvious connection back to AGL’s core function as an energy supplier.

How to engage the audience

While the best staff want to be engaged, there are some elements a program must offer its audience in order to be successful.

Both management and promoters of the program need to be knowledgeable and support it. Staff must see benefits for their performance, their career and the company’s performance. A program can be engaging if it’s a forum for ideas and more so if those ideas are acknowledged, if not carried through. It also needs to provide challenge and tasks outside participants’comfort level, depending on the program.

Lend Lease’s Community Day offers most of these elements. Each project has a coordinator who organises staff and is given a budget to manage for the day. Community Day projects also offer employees opportunities to work in other areas and take up more challenging roles. Melissa Vieusseux explains by how the day empowers staff by example: “One time the staff were painting a cubbyhouse that they designed and built and the media came out and approached a manager for a quote. The manager directed them to the staff member who had organised the day. Speaking to the media is something this person wouldn’t normally do.”

As teams span different departments and levels, the result is often better communication and teamwork. Vieusseux sees the benefits of the program as relationship building and a great leveller. On any one project “you can find a senior manager asking an IT staff member, ‘What do I do now?’”

She quotes an email from a participant as being typical of staff feedback: “I’ve been with the company for six years and remember every single project. I’ve met new people and the day after Community Day, there’s always a bit of a buzz – a sense of what we can do when people pull together.”

Developing an engaging process

In engaging staff, the method used to develop a program is just as important as the opportunities it can provide. Common to all three organisations is the way they involved staff at all levels to make decisions about their policies.

In selecting a partner, Cisco surveyed its staff about their ideas on their commitment to corporate citizenship. “They identified education, the internet and disadvantaged young people,” according to Scope. Cisco believed that “staff have a natural understanding of what benefits the business”. To avoid the survey being a popularity contest and disappointing staff whose choice was not recognised, Cisco asked their employees about things that were important to them, rather than just naming a charity to partner.

Providing choice to employees was important to AGL in creating the firm’s staff giving program. AGL surveyed staff about which charities interested them. According to AGL’s manager, government relations and public affairs, Frier Bentley, the consultation was about employee pride. “We asked our staff what would appeal to them that would make them proud to work for AGL.” From the results of this survey they shortlisted 10 charities which employees could donate to.

Lend Lease’s employees can nominate which charity they want to help and as long as they can organise three or more staff members, Lend Lease will then accept it as a project for Community Day. “Staff see Community Day as something for them and it’s important to them that they have a choice in what they do,”according to Vieusseux. They can choose something that “strikes a chord, and is meaningful for them”.

Engaging at multiple points

Cisco, Lend Lease and AGL have adopted a multi-contact approach as an effective way of communicating their activities.

Cisco’s Scope believed it was possible to organise 150 hamper packers with one email, as many employees have worked on Smith Family tasks. “It’s a matrix of relationships. The head of sales has links with The Smith Family in Victoria. The CEO of Cisco has a strong relationship with the CEO of The Smith Family and different business units have interconnecting relationships.”

AGL uses multiple contact points for its volunteering and donating program. “We have a champions’ network,” Bentley says. “There are 80 champions in the program scattered across the country, who provide updates, information and opportunities to staff.”

Lend Lease also used a coordinator’s approach. “Initially there was confusion about the meaning of the program,” Vieusseux found. “We then selected teams of coordinators who explained what our intention was and that we wanted people to pick projects. Now the day is part of the culture and there is no need to explain.”

Some concluding tips on engagement

The pathway in introducing any new policy is never completely clear and the challenges vary from company to company. It’s worthwhile, therefore, concluding on the lessons on engagement from some of the challenges Cisco, Lend Lease and AGL faced.

• To learn from others’ experience, both AGL and Cisco outsourced the design and development of their programs. They recognised they did not have the relationships in and knowledge of the community sector that an expert may have. Lend Lease by contrast used the community contacts and relationships of the firm’s staff members to build up their knowledge base.

• Cisco ensured the business remained focussed on The Smith Family partnership by introducing accountability. Managing the relationship is built into the key business objectives of groups such as marketing.

• Both Cisco and Lend Lease have centrally coordinated their CSR functions to maintain consistency of message and a main point of ownership.

• Lend Lease recommends that the purpose and benefits of the policy be clearly defined before attempting to communicate it company-wide.

• Most importantly, however, all three companies recognise that a CSR policy can only be effective if it’s more than just donating money.

• For any meaningful engagement to occur, employees need to get involved. Staff who volunteer their time and skills realise the impact they can have on the community group. They understand the true purpose of the group. Strong relationships naturally happen when different people work together on diverse tasks, and these relationships occur at many levels.