Social Impact Meets HR

Social Impacts Meets HR

Employee engagement has been at the top of many HR leaders' priority list, but with increasingly remote workforces, the traditional engagement strategies – that are also important for attracting and retaining talent – must shift. Corporate happy hours and mentor programs are no longer enough. Employees are looking for their organizations to show up and do good; therefore the intersection between HR and social impact is growing. There are greater demands on HR leaders to become the champions behind CSR, philanthropy, and community support in the name of true employee engagement.

Introduction

Ben Sampson:

Thank you all so much. Really appreciate you joining this session, and I hope I could be helpful with the small amount of time that I have here. Twenty minutes is a lot to cover everything that's happening when it comes to social impact, meeting HR, and just how much HR leaders are getting tapped these days to focus on engaging employees through social impact endeavors like volunteering, giving, so on and so forth. But I'm very excited to be here, and I always like to lead off by saying everybody's challenges, goals, and programs are so drastically different.

So I hope you're able to garner just a little bit of knowledge with the time that I have with you. And if it's of any interest, please reach out. I love helping companies solve some of these challenges. So we focus about engaging more employees through social impact and how we can do that at scale with a very small amount of time that we have.

A little bit about me and why I'm here. You know, I'm the Managing Director of CSR here at WizeHive. Our job is really to bring purpose and impact into the workplace, and we do that through grants management software, CSR platforms that focus on giving and volunteering, and a whole company called WeHero that's dedicated to volunteering and engagement experiences.

I've been doing this for about five years working mostly with Fortune 1000 companies on how we can engage employees at scale and create meaningful, impactful experiences.

And so, you know, I really stumbled into this world of social impact, employee engagement, and working with HR leaders. I used to do volunteering abroad, living up at fourteen thousand feet in Peru. My bathroom would literally be a hole in the ground that's, like, this large. And so I was in volunteering and didn't think there was a place for it, for me in the corporate world.

The Changing Role of HR

And then I stumbled into this whole world of corporate social responsibility, working with HR leaders, working with CSR professionals, and understanding some of the gaps and challenges in regards to, how do we execute employee engagement and volunteer programs at scale. And specifically with HR leaders, you know, I was noticing more and more HR leaders that were just really struggling in regards to, I'm getting tapped to do this. I'm getting tapped to build volunteer experiences to offer social impact programs. How do I do that successfully, especially when I don't have a CSR and ESG team to lean on?

And so, over the years, I just started working more and more with HR leaders, and, we built a solution called WeHero at that time that was focused on employee engagement and volunteerism and doing that at scale. So here I am getting to meet with all of you, and I know we're talking lot about the changing world of HR and how your roles are all shifting as HR leaders. And I think social impact is one of the biggest shifts that we're noticing take place as something that HR leaders are having to deal with.

The Rising Importance of Social Impact

I always like to joke that the wave is here, and it has been here for some time, but it's growing. And I knew this was going to only become increasingly more important as the data kept rolling in year after year in regards to how powerful employee engagement and social impact programs are for businesses.

And, you know, we started seeing data on, you know, the benefits to a company's brand, the benefits to sales. But then, you know, we started seeing HR leaders getting tapped more and more for social impact and engagement activities because we started seeing a lot of data come in around turnover, around retention, around how do we attract millennials to start working at our businesses.

And, you know, just some of the metrics that out of hundreds of metrics that are out now that I often like to go to is, you know, Deloitte did a study that found that companies with strong CSR programs, they have thirty five percent lower turnover rates than companies with, you know, underperforming CSR programs. When we look at that study done by the Society of Human Resource Management, they found that seventy two percent of employees will be more likely to stay with the company if if they were proud of that company's social responsibility efforts and their volunteer efforts. And when we look at even more broader studies from the World Economic Forum, they found that eighty seven percent of millennials say that they would prefer to work for a company that was committed to CSR and social impact.

And so the data really supports why as HR leaders, we're all getting tapped on the shoulder to think about this. It's playing a huge role in regards to turnover and engagement within our employee basis.

Data and Cost Analysis

And I had someone a couple weeks ago ask me the question of, Ben, how much is this costing me? If I don't have these programs in place? How much does this cost me, and how can I justify this to my leadership team that this is important?

I took a, a step back and thought about that and looked at some of the data points that we capture on our end and data points, that we know exist today. We know that the average employee, they volunteer about fifty two hours per year. And we know there is thirty five percent lower turnover when we have really successful programs in place for social impact and volunteerism. The average cost of turnover per employee in the US is, you know, around fifteen thousand.

I know that's very different based on the business that you're in. If you're in a tech company with, you know, highly skilled labor, you know, that that cost is much higher. But for the sake of this exercise and for myself, I put it at fifteen thousand dollars as the average cost of turnover per employee. And so when we start looking at the numbers, we start doing the math for these companies, and we think about retention.

We know that for every hour that an employee volunteers, that saves us an average of a hundred and ten dollars. And I'll say it one more time. So we know that for every hour that employee volunteers, that saves us a hundred and ten dollars per volunteer hour. And that's pretty substantial, and that adds up really quick.

And, again, that's an average based on, you know, fifteen thousand dollars for turnover work hours per employee.

The average cost of turnover per employee in the U.S. is $15,000. And companies that have successful social impact and volunteerism programs see 35% lower turnover."

Common Challenges HR Leaders Face

What's challenging is that more and more HR leaders are the ones that are getting tapped on the shoulder to engage employees in these social impact efforts rather than a dedicated CSR or ESG team. Or there is a dedicated CSR or ESG team, and our HR leaders, they're getting highly involved because it's becoming so important. And so as I meet with different HR professionals, I noticed they're in one of two positions.

Position number one is my company. They have a CSR and ESG strategy. I'm getting involved in how to activate and engage our people around this for employee attraction and retention.

How do I best do this, And how do I best utilize existing resources and do this at scale? Because time is my greatest resource.

Position number two, my company doesn't have a corporate social responsibility function. We don't have an environment, social, and governance strategy. I'm getting asked to lead these efforts because we're a smaller business, and I'm getting asked to produce a plan. Where do I even start?

With both of these, they're really challenging because time as I as I meet with HR leaders, time is their greatest resource. You're asked to do so much. And so my goal here as we think about social impact initiatives is to focus on twenty eighty solutions.

Also because I only have twenty minutes with y'all, so I'm going to only focus on the high leverage solutions. Time again is your greatest resources and HR leader with so much on your plate. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the things that I think can push, your metrics the farthest and reach your goals.

Strategies For Scaling Social Impact

I'm going to talk a lot about scaling social impact, and I always go to something we created called, the social impact flywheel. This is when I go into companies and I'm working with them on the strategy, we often start here. How do we create engagement and volunteers and social impact at scale? Step one in the flywheel approach is activating employees at the earliest opportunity.

This is, for example, you know, a new cohort of employees that are coming in, getting activated around volunteering, engaging them right out the gate, and getting them excited about social impact programs is really critical. Because if you do that successfully, it'll be much easier to engage them throughout the rest of their tenure at the company. Let me give you an example. We worked with Visa, and Visa had every single cohort of employees do a volunteer program in their very first week being onboarded. And what resulted was the employees were incredibly excited that they joined a company that was passionate about social impact. It confirmed their belief that, hey. We applied to work here because we believe Visa stood for something greater than just the job that I applied to do here.

And, also, they were substantially more engaged throughout company wide engagement efforts and programs. And so activating employees at the earliest opportunity is really critical because when we get to step two of the flywheel of looking to constantly engage employees because that's what's exciting and meaningful to them in, like, company wide programs, they're much more likely to join. Company wide programs. An example of this, I just came back from a five hundred person sales conference in Orlando.

And as part of that four day conference, they dedicated one hour of that conference to being devoted to volunteerism. They did a whole volunteer project, and everybody there was able to participate.

And we have company wide programs like a Giving Tuesday campaign. Maybe it's an Earth Month campaign or a corporate week of service. We see engagement tick up because we activate these employees. They got excited about volunteering and social impact, and now they're focusing on that twenty eighty, where scale really starts to happen is that we have where scale really starts to happen is that we have what I call level one volunteer, which is they're activated at the earliest opportunity.

They become a level two volunteer, meaning, hey. We're constantly engaging. We're donating. We're using the, we're participating in social impact efforts.

We're volunteering. They become what I call a level three volunteer or social impact champion. This is what you want to get to because these are what we call ambassadors.

They are actively promoting volunteer and engagement, social impact efforts throughout the company. They're actively building programs, building events, providing input, and this is where we see a ton of scale start to occur. It also gives you some of that time back. So you're not the one planning all these initiatives. It's your employee base that you've strategically planned and engaged with that's taking these programs forward and making huge amount of impact. More on this to come, but I talk a lot about this flywheel, so I wanted to give you all a brief overview of what that looks like.

For Companies With Existing CSR and ESG Strategies

Moving on. I talked about position one. Again, position one is my company has a CSR ESG strategy. I'm getting involved in how to activate and engage our people around this for employee attraction or attention, and how do I best do this?

What I recommended to HR leaders in this scenario, first off, get a clear picture of the social impact goals from leadership or the responsible team. This is really, really important because you want to make sure that you're aligning with the strategy around social impact to get more leadership buy in and get more funding as well to support these efforts. Again, I talked about in that flywheel the importance of activating employees at the earliest opportunity. This is going to equal a lot more engagement in the long run.

So very important that we do this and activate employees very early on. We want to look for opportunities to embed social impact and engagement experiences into existing programming events. I mean, with a lot of HR leaders, they're strapped for time, and they don't have the bandwidth to go out and plan a dedicated day of service. They don't have the time to go out and plan an entire Giving Tuesday campaign.

But what they can do is take an existing programmed event like the sales conference that I just use as an example and embed a volunteer and engagement experience into that. The people are together. The facilities are all lined up. You just have to inject the volunteerism and social impact into that because you already have a captive audience.

I always recommend working with internal and external partners. Again, time is our greatest resource. We know that a lot of HR leaders, they're short on bandwidth. They're short on resources.

You cannot do this alone. The use of volunteer ambassadors are key for larger organizations. I talked about that level one, level two, level three volunteer and social impact ambassador. You want to get to that level three champion and ambassador and have a network of those folks that can help you scale these efforts, especially in larger organizations.

I also think it's very important to consider working with external partners. Partners like WizeHive are super important to allow you to move fast and be an extension of your team, and also measure, optimize, and scale. I was just working with an HR leader that they have a given campaign.

They have a volunteer program. They're tracking all of it in an Excel spreadsheet. They're even doing their donations manually to nonprofits and doing their receipts manually with the finance team, and it's taking a massive amount of their time. And so and they're also not measuring and tracking accurately how many volunteer hours are act actually taking place, how many donor dollars are actually occurring. And this can be really challenging because we need to measure and optimize so that we can make the case back to leadership that this is important, that we need to continue getting leadership buy in and support, and we can continue scaling these efforts.

For Companies Who Don't Have a Strategy But Are Looking to Start

Now position number two, again, position two is I don't have a CSR and ESG strategy. I don't have a CSR and ESG team. I'm getting asked to lead these efforts and build a plan. And where do I even start?

First and foremost is work with leadership again to understand any and all social impact goals that might be taking place. And I always recommend to HR leaders, the closer you align the social impact goals with the business goals, the more buying and support you will get from leadership. Good example of this is Warby Parker. They sell glasses. They created a social impact program around making visibility more accessible. So they start donating thousands hundreds of thousands of glasses.

And they took it to another level, their HR and social impact team. They went, hey. We're going to engage employees by having them volunteer and support those that have visual impairments and visual disabilities.

And so they actually have a program where they're volunteering now, and they're using systems like FaceTime to connect with people that have a visual impairment and helping them pick out their socks so they have matching socks for the day, helping someone, you know, find the bus stop that has a really trouble has trouble seeing or has blindness.

And so we've seen that work super well in a number of cases, Rory Parker just being one example of how you can align the social impact pieces with the business goals because you get a lot more leadership buying and a lot more support for your efforts.

Again, take the flywheel approach in regards to building an engagement strategy that allows your program to scale and grow. That flywheel that I shared earlier is really, really critical. And then focus on these five key areas of success.

Again, activate employees at the earliest opportunity. I just gave you the Visa example. That's a really good way to do it. You want to embed volunteerism into existing events.

Again, you are only one person or you're only one leadership team. You'll have so many resources. So using existing programs is a huge twenty eighty to get you results, to reach and engage employees. Support ambassadors and ERG leaders, you can't do this alone.

You need those internal team members that can help you. You want to track your data year over year to make this case to leadership. Having platform technology to do this, really essential. We've seen this one, scale time, and create a lot more efficiencies optimizations for the HR team to do this successfully and get more leadership buy in and support with that data.

And we can correlate the data that you're getting from engagement, giving, and social impact within the company to engagement, retention, attracting new talent, it becomes a really powerful use case for leadership to get more funding and support for this. And even if you don't have a CSR or an ESG team, we're seeing CSR and ESG teams being built as a result of having this data. And, again, platforms and partners are really helpful here. Again, I meet so many HR leaders that are strapped for time.

They're getting tapped on the shoulder to do this.

Using platforms and using partners are really, really helpful to do this and find those folks that can be an extension of your team.

Getting Leadership Buy-In

Quite often, I get the question of, okay, Ben. You've talked a lot about leadership buying, leadership buying, and how important that is to having a really successful program.

My leadership's not bought in. What do I do? Like, how do I get at in front of leadership in a really large company? What I've seen work most successfully here is campaigning is key.

And what I mean by campaigning is if you can't get to the CEO and executive level, go as high up in the organization as you can. Start working with the VP of marketing. Start working with the VP of development. Get as many folks as high up in the organization, bought into the program, bought into the strategy, and you'll start seeing that campaigning effort taken effect where they're promoting the programs as well.

They're having their teams and their employees participate in your programming, and leadership starts to take notice. It just takes a longer period of time. Sometimes it takes, you know, three months. Sometimes it takes twelve months with this campaigning effort in place.

And so just one of many ways that we can get leadership bought out of this because that is really critical.

Conclusion

Again, I only get twenty minutes with you all, and I can only cover so much in such a short time. But I just want to summarize a few things. So social impact, it's becoming part of our roles as HR leaders, and it's increasingly tied to employee engagement, retention, and attracting new talent. The way employees are engaging within our companies, it's changing.

Happy hours are no longer going to be the solution. People are looking for meaning. They're looking for purpose. They're looking for justification to use their time.

Time is not just our greatest resources or as HR leaders. Time is becoming increasingly more important to all of our employees that are working at our companies. And so how do we justify the use of their time for them to engage and be a team? And I always like to mention I'm biased, but I feel volunteering is one of the greatest forms of team building.

There's nothing like teams coming together that work on a common goal to support a really powerful cause that's aligned to a company's brand. And so every company is different. Every company has its own challenges, has its own goals, has its own different organizational structures that creates its own challenges in and of itself. I always encourage you just to please reach out.

I'm here to help and work with these things. I've been working with a lot of companies over the years, and I get the greatest amount of joy just getting to sit down with HR leaders and social impact leaders and companies and understand their gaps and challenges and how we can build scale into these efforts to get them resources and to get them to hit the engagement numbers that they're looking for within their companies and to really see how we can correlate that data from, hey. We're making a huge amount of impact. But the same time that we're doing that, we're also increasing retention at our business.

We're saving, on costs, and we're attracting the greatest talent because they're excited to work for these brands. I just started working with, a legal firm, and they were sharing with me that they're interviewing candidates. One in every three candidates in the interview process is asking about the social impact programs that are taking place. And it's just a reminder that our roles as HR leaders is becoming a little bigger.

We're getting tasked with these things and ask for these things. And so, it's an exciting time. I think social impact is really rewarding. It's just about getting the time to do that and thinking about your twenty eighty and how you can do this at scale, when you're getting tapped, to do this and have this be a part of your job.

So, again, happy to sit down with any and all of you to work on this. Thank you so much for the time and the quick twenty minutes. I wish I had more time to spend with you and could dive into more details, but I hope these few tips were helpful as you take this on in your roles.

Q&A

Steve Koepp:

Well, Ben, actually, thank you. That was a very persuasive, presentation and also, a nice angle that had we hadn't really covered yet today. You have we have a minute or two left, and I have a couple of questions for you if you've got if you've got time as well.

Ben Sampson:

I'm just excited that I got it done in twenty minutes. I was nervous about that, Steve. So, yeah, happy to answer the questions.

Steve Koepp:

Your train runs on time. I just thought, could you tell us a little more about the changes you've seen in employee engagement with remote and hybrid workers? Because they're we're really in that. That those things have really settled in. I know there's still some back and forth about going back to the office, but we're not going all the ways, with that. So, what are those changes sort of those enduring changes?

Ben Sampson:

Yeah. When it comes to engagement, it's been really challenging. It's interesting. We have our companies that have a full time remote workforce in many cases, and those employees are eager to engage because they're isolated.

Vice versa, we have employees that are in a hybrid setup or they're back in office full time, and they're not as likely to engage. And we're definitely seeing that in the data. What we've noticed is that we've seen a rise in different formats in regards to engaging employees. And so, for example, you know, we have volunteer experiences that can be delivered to employees' homes.

So we have employees that are building water filters in their kitchens, for example, and they're doing the same exact experience as the in office employees are doing as well. So we're looking for these these volunteer and engagement formats to kind of bridge that gap, if you will, Steve, to engage these people and give them the equal opportunity to be a part of the culture, to be a part of the team regardless of their location. It's a huge challenge that companies are dealing with. So we're seeing a lot of those formats take place.

I can dive more into that, but I'm also happy to answer another question, Steve, with the time that we have.

Steve Koepp:

Sure.

Well, you make a good case for why this is important is it's coming up a lot among prospective workers. But, what outcomes or measures do you recommend tracking to measure the business impact of voluntary?

Ben Sampson:

Yeah. Great question. So I talked about that metric, you know, first and foremost about, you know, a hundred and ten dollars per volunteer hour. Right? So, like, that's a rough metric that we put together at WizeHive.

I recommend tracking a few things. One, number of volunteer hours is always an easy metric.

Two, the number of employees, not just but number of employees are getting engaged in programs is a really great program to track.

Three, I always recommend that, you survey employees after the volunteer engagement experiences about the importance not just of the volunteer engagement effort, but how it relates to how they feel about their company and their brand. The survey data is incredibly valuable. We when we do, we hear our volunteer experiences. We ask employees directly after that event.

Are you more excited to work for your company as a result of this program? How often do you want to have these opportunities to volunteer and engage?

It it so those key kind of questions and those data points are really critical. It differs again company to company, what's going to be important from a data capture standpoint, but just some of the things that we wanna keep an eye on. And and I think there's the other side of the volunteer engagement. We also have social impact programs and employee giving is another big part of this. And so understanding how many employees are actually signing up for a CSR or social impact program, giving, donating, all metrics that are important to track, and then you track the metrics around that. The how is since we've launched this program, how is retention improving? How is, employee attractiveness improving?

All of these things we start to track and measure and correlate together.

Steve Koepp:

Well, thank you. Ben Sampson from WizeHive. We really appreciate your being here.

Ben Sampson:

Thanks, Steve. Appreciate the time.