There’s more to employee engagement in CSR

It’s a lovely stat provided by Leap CR:

A 1% increase in productivity in the services sector would result in the UK GDP growing by £17bn.

The potential source of this increase in productivity? Employee engagement via corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Leap CR surveyed 1,007 employees on their employers’ commitment to CSR and the impact it had on their personal engagement with the business.

63% of respondents believed that paid time off during working hours to be spent on charitable initiatives would significantly improve engagement in their business. 57% of respondents wanted their companies to contribute more in the field of CSR and to support more charities.

On first impressions both stats probably make you feel quite optimistic about CSR and employee engagement (and the UK economy). It would seem UK employees (1) care about responsibility issues, (2) want their company to care about them and (3) would like to make a contribution, hopefully with the support of their company, during working hours.

But the stats belie the complexities of employee engagement and reduce employee engagement in CSR to charity days, when we all know CSR is much more than that.

Employee engagement in CSR – or corporate responsibility or sustainability, as different companies term it for different reasons – is one of the most difficult engagement tasks for companies because CSR isn’t a single issue. It’s a filter for looking at the way you do business, every aspect of it. So every employee in every role has responsibility issues to address, in the way the company they work for has deemed appropriate. So where do you start with engagement in it?

As with any good engagement process you have to break things down, fine tuning your engagement process and messages to specific employee segments, making it explicit how the company’s policies convert into employee actions, and enabling contributions and feedback from employees, who know the reality of their jobs, to shape how things develop.

Plus you have to influence the influencers first before you can expect to engage the broader mass of employees. And then when you think you’ve fully engaged the influencers you have to do it again because engagement is an on-going process not a project with a beginning and an end.

It’s not really politic to say – because every employee really does count – but when it comes to motivating discretionary extra effort amongst your employees, you’re far better off focusing on the people you can get a 5% increase in productivity from than the full swathe of employees you’d like to get a 1% increase from. Work on the employees who are motivated by what they can put into a company for their personal sense of achievement and contribution, rather than those who are always wanting to take more out – more pay, more benefits – because the latter are not really engaged and therefore less likely to increase productivity.

Which kind of employees participating in the survey believed paid time off during working hours to be spent on charitable initiatives would significantly improve engagement in their business? Possibly a notable proportion of employees who aren’t currently engaged in the business they work for on any level at all.

By no means stop the employee charity days. They do motivate [some] employees, are a really worthwhile contribution to charities and could be an appropriate start to employee engagement in CSR. Just don’t see them as a silver bullet to employee engagement and productivity, as the survey implies. Nor the only form of CSR you need to engage your employees in. You know it’s true. There’s more to it than that.