Category: CSR

I’ve become somewhat obsessed lately with the relationship between HR and CSR. I’ve posted on this topic using a metaphor of a budding romance between training and CSR, and I’ve written about some business examples of the value of good training and communications for CSR.

This article takes a more visual approach to the topic. Inspired by a simple Venn diagram from Elaine Cohen’s excellent book CSR for HR, I’d like to propose a new leveraged approach to business communications.

I’ll begin with a shout-out to Elaine for her groundbreaking work linking the HR and CSR functions. Where all too often these two areas of business are siloed from each other, HR is now picking up on the value of CSR activities to enhance core HR areas such as employee recruiting, retention, engagement, training, health and safety, diversity, volunteering, and of course employee communications more generally. With her Business Communications 2.0 framework, Cohen shows how linking HR and CSR communications can help companies better engage their employees through communicating CSR activities internally.

We love this idea and recognize that it is a new one for a lot of businesses. Yet even in businesses where the idea has traction, it seems that implementation is where the rubber meets the road.

So from my role as a CEO of a company that is as much interested in implementation as it is in strategy, I want to pose taking this idea one step further. Our approach focuses on tactical efficiencies in aligning CSR, HR, and PR/marketing. It builds on Elaine’s more strategic approach but brings all three perspectives together so that there is a sweet spot in the middle, born of alignment around shared communication needs. From this sweet spot, a platform for the communication of the company’s values can be created, not just at a high-level messaging perspective but as a suite of content and communications assets.

Through a process of content analysis, values assessment, and needs assessment, a team can design and develop a central online expression of the company’s values and a strategy for leveraging that expression beyond this one core asset. Thus, a values-based communications platform is built.

The idea here is we convene your best team from marketing, HR and/or employee education, CSR, sustainability, and PR/marketing to co-create the best-leveraged asset strategy for your business communications needs. By combining your budgetary powers, you can make a truly best-in-class set of values-based communications assets.

One obvious starting point for the heart of the values platform is an interactive CSR report. This report speaks to both external and internal audiences in a way that engages and inspires. We believe that a best-in-class interactive CSR report takes an education-based marketing approach and does not just look to add more bells and whistles. Ideas include:

• An interactive CSR report microsite
• A video or click-through avatar-guided learning tour of your core business values and CSR contributions
• A game-based approach (e.g., leveraging our pub-style trivia game) to teach visitors about your CSR programs
• Interactive charts and graphs showing the results of CSR-related changes
• Interactive education-based banners and infographics

We believe this is an all-too-often missed opportunity for real learning and emotional engagement that can replace the sterile and unremarkable standards we see today. You know what I’m talking about—those plain text corporate responsibility policy documents and those thrilling CSR report PDFs, spiced up only by pie charts and pictures of people planting trees.

Within the framework of the interactive CSR report, there are messaging and graphic elements that can be repurposed for other needs such as recruiting, new-hire and ongoing employee trainings, dealer and vendor communications, or for parts of the websites the company maintains for various audiences.

Building on this foundation, a full platform of repurposable and multi-stakeholder assets adds depth and addresses specific needs. Additional elements might include:

• A slide deck on community service activities
• Integrating eco-rewards into your company SPIF programs
• A video message from the CEO on the company’s environmental policies
• Internal messaging such as:
  • Intranet banners
  • Talking points for managers for building buy-in and champions internally (e.g., a PPT deck that gives the basic case for why CSR is important in that company)
  • E-mail blasts and regular newsletters
  • Dealer brochures, posters, and collateral
  • And more. You tell us what kinds of assets would serve your business!

I’m happy to report that branding thought leaders are beginning to recognize the value of this kind of thinking. A recent Sustainable Brands post on the topic of the need for marketing chops to improve CSR reports definitely gave me some hope. Taking this and Cohen’s ideas combined, we can kill all sorts of birds (in the most humane way…) with the stone of this kind of values-based business communications platform.

Perhaps business unit politics makes this win-win-win idea too good to be true, but I’ll take a stand for idealism here and simply state that the more we can bring the messaging and messengers for an organization together to collaborate on the best and most meaningful practices a company is engaged in, the better. If for some reason the ideal situation does not emerge, we do believe that even within one area of the business—say, marketing—there is a real case for this values-based platform for people to draw from within the department.

Any way you slice it, from the statistics we have been seeing, the likelihood is that people inside and outside your organization right now would be more engaged by better communication of your organization’s values and how you practice them.

(This post is the follow up to Andrei’s last post about ecology and business.)

Life is all about thriving. You could even call it a shared value of all living systems. This value often manifests as an urge or impulse to move toward that which supports life. Plants reach for the sun, roots move toward water, social species move toward the community. To me, a business is a living system as well. The urge to thrive manifests itself as a need to make a profit. But just as a plant needs sun and water to thrive, so also a business needs more than just profit. Our core value at SweetRush lies in being what is commonly called a triple bottom line (3BL) business — one that moves toward a mutual good that encompasses economic, social, and ecological considerations. People, planet, and profit. Maximizing thriving, minimizing harm. Good Things!

So at its core, this value is what the Good Things Initiative here at SweetRush is all about. But moving from the old profit-only mindset to the more complex 3BL approach has not been easy. Like the Osa Rainforest in Costa Rica, this sort of complex harmony requires evolution, time, and opportunities to thrive.

As I mentioned in my last post, “How a Rainforest Changed Our Company,” one of the key lessons learned has been that the people part of the 3BL approach starts with the company’s internal team. As The Body Shop® founder Anita Roddick famously said, “We were searching for employees, but people showed up instead.” Even as CEO, standing on my Good Things soapbox is of little value until I am actually awakening and empowering that same impulse in the minds and hearts of everyone on my team. For our complex ecology to thrive, everyone has to be moving toward the light, so to speak, and I can’t just tell them from the top to do so. I have to inspire them to bring their own innate life-affirming values to work with them every day.

And once I got this, it’s been a lot easier! Our people are inherently values-driven individuals — we have always had a strong culture of caring at SweetRush, and we are very intentional about discovering this quality in our HR process. We look for people who care about their craft, the people they work with, and the world around them. This alignment helps our organization in the practice of our values, of course, but also in offering better service.

Now, “I” has shifted to “We,” and with ongoing employee engagement and education around our nuanced approach, our team is more and more focused on encouraging and nurturing a sense of “good things” in many ways across our business. Here’s a teaser of some of the keystone parts of our ever-evolving Good Things ecology:

The Good Things Rebrand

2013 has been a year of self-expression for SweetRush with a whole new brand, website, blog, and active social media presence. All of these efforts are expressions of our commitment to more actively share our values and to share our services with new audiences. We use our web presence to promote Good Things in the world in many ways, such as with our “thumbs of change” series, our new portraits of world-changers project on Facebook®, and our upcoming sustainability pub quiz (on our website soon, stay tuned…).

We’ve also focused our business development toward finding client partners aligned with our values and whose own CSR endeavors we can support with our customized services). These efforts have already differentiated us to client partners seeking a team with shared commitments to sustainability and socially responsible business practices. And we are thrilled to be supporting more and more inspiring 3BL business approaches with our training and design skills. You can get a taste of some of the work we’ve done in this arena in our Good Things Facebook album.

The Meaning of Work Campaign

Recently, some of our team met to explore how we could bring more of the meaning and purpose of work into our training design.
Why? Because meaning improves both work performance and satisfaction!

• Learning is improved when leaders have an emotional connection to learning.
• Intrinsic motivation is much more powerful in improving performance and creating change.
• Meaning and purpose connect us to more complex and dynamic values than the simple single financial bottom line.
• When we are making progress on meaningful work, we thrive better — even in suboptimal work environments. (Check out Teresa Amabile’s The Progress Principle for more on this.)

For us, this commitment to bring meaning to training also helps to embed our company values into how we offer our services. Our team unanimously agrees that this in turn enhances our services and differentiates our approach and process. So for SweetRush, asking whether there is an opportunity to enhance the training with connecting to meaning and purpose is now a sweet item on our best practices checklist for clients and a way that we enact our values in our day-to-day project work. For more on this innovative approach, check out my colleague Catherine’s blog post, “Does Your Training Have Meaning?”

Virtual Team Volunteering

SweetRushians love volunteering — check out this inspiring little project from this past spring in Costa Rica, for example. Getting together like this is rare for our virtual teams, though, so we use a theme-based rolling campaign approach. Our current theme is food justice. This fall, employees will get paid for volunteering for food-related causes of their choice in their local areas with groups of SweetRush employees encouraged to volunteer together where possible. There will also be ongoing education and awareness opportunities for staff throughout the campaign. Stay tuned for more on this on our SweetRush Facebook page!

Quality of Life Officer

Absolutely central to any effective approach to 3BL business is walking the walk internally and caring for your own employees first. One way we have devised to do this is through the role of a Quality of Life Officer (QLO), who is responsible for advocating a healthy life-work harmony for our team, in line with our values. This year we are revising our approach to have this be a rotating position among our department heads and their deputies. This will help vary the voice and focus of this role, and also create new leadership and learning opportunities for our team.

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These are a few of the components that make up the ecology of Good Things at SweetRush. The everyday practice of bringing our values to life through our services is of course our most central offering, and I’m pleased to see our team come together to find more and more creative ways to integrate our Good Things values into our core services. Stepping back, I see a healthy, productive, virtual forest beginning to take root at SweetRush. And from my home office in California, suddenly that magical rainforest in Costa Rica that first helped me see the light doesn’t seem so far away.

Some time ago, I took a trip that changed my life and the future of our company. The life-changing lesson was about the nature of design, and the power of business to help build a better future. And I learned it, of all places, from a rainforest.

The “Aha” Vacation

At the time, I was living in San Francisco: an amazing city to live in. During the ’90s and 2000s, it was filled with intrigue for everyone from yogis to barfly hipsters to artists to entrepreneurs. It seemed to me an absolute paramount of collaborative social design — an ever-evolving expression of humanity and what it is capable of on many levels. When I had the chance, I would drive out to Treasure Island at night with friends and look back at the City by the Bay, lit up and bustling with the activity of a world going online. I was amazed to think that what I was looking at had essentially been built in a just a few hundred years.

In 2005, I went to the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica and saw what the natural world was capable of in its design. Countless layers of life and process were going on in that old growth rainforest, with endless complexity and ruthless harmony. Without exaggeration, this is one of the most biodiverse places on our planet, with four species of monkeys, flocks of scarlet macaws, sea turtles, and blue morpho butterflies the size of your outstretched hand. Trees, bushes, and vines were layered one on top of the other with some of the rarest orchids in the world hanging from them. It’s a system that is prolific in its mass, activity, and beauty — as it has been for thousands of years.

When I returned to San Francisco, its mere hundreds of years of social innovation seemed child’s play in comparison to the scale, complexity, and ingenuity I experienced in Osa. The business world in particular seemed very immature in its design when I looked at what it was doing in the world, and how simplistic it seemed to need things to create or perceive any sort of abundance. How limited its feedback mechanisms are with what seems like a single feedback of a single bottom line, whereas the rainforest measures itself on so many levels and responds in kind.

Soap boxes set aside (and used as a compost bin, of course), this isn’t a rant about corporate greed, but rather about corporate influence and inspiration over its own design. The level of awareness, process, design, and systems that I saw making up the business world and other aspects of human society just felt infantile in comparison to the ancient systems I witnessed in the Osa.

I began stewing over how business might learn from nature’s design principles. I also woke up to the urgency of our need to learn to exist in greater harmony with the natural we are a part of so that we can address global challenges like peak oil, materials, and climate change.

Lessons in Green Business Leadership

It was around this time that I began attending the Green Festival in San Francisco, and learned from pioneering business leaders who are working to enact just this sort of nature-inspired change in our systems design.

I heard Ray Anderson of Interface Carpet Corporation (learn about Ray’s own “aha” moment here) talk about businesses moving from plunderers of the earth to beneficiaries and stewards of sustainable economic and ecological systems. His vision seemed so consistent with the abundance I saw in the Osa, and I saw how businesses could become more robust by aligning and being inspired by natural constraints.

Learning from Ray and others shed light on the challenges of bringing society, economy, and nature into harmony, I became inspired by my own role and influence as a business owner. With SweetRush, I could be a contributor in this movement of rethinking business as not just a user of abundance, but as contributor to an abundant system.

Discovering Our Own Green Business Ecology

Initially, I was rather green myself as I bumbled into what these insights meant for my business. Like many early-stage eco-enthusiasts, I first got on a soap box and started preaching. While there were some like minds around me, for the most part I was not convincing. (Check out this great video on “green jujitsu” to get a sense of why this approach so rarely works!)

Through this process, my assumptions about where this change would be most meaningful have shifted. Initially, I felt we should rush out and help other businesses wake up to a sustainable way of doing business. Now I believe our team should be focused on nurturing, expanding, and evolving our existing cultural and values foundations to a more-holistic approach to “doing good” as a business. We have great skills and abilities — now, how do we use them to help larger organizations with their best practices and initiatives?

There’s no preaching in the rainforest. The complex ecology is created through ongoing, dynamic, and sometimes tense collaboration amongst all players in the system. Over the years, I have learned my way into this healthier approach with the ecology that is SweetRush: building team buy-in, co-creating our vision of what doing good looks like for our business, and working with our existing values and resources to grow our positive influence both internally and externally.

As a leader, I am really a steward of the health of our business ecology: the well-being of our people, the vibrancy of our resource base, and the enactment of our foundational culture of caring internally, with clients, and with the greater natural, industrial, and social ecologies in which we are embedded.

Seeing the Rainforest Through the Trees

My time in the City by the Bay is less frequent, and perhaps that makes its continued evolution more striking each time I visit. Some changes are positive: concrete medians replaced with permeable surfaces and drought-tolerant plants — an effort to reduce the burden on city drainage and create ecosystem. Like the Osa, San Francisco seems to be leaning toward diversity while searching for a cacophonous harmony.

SweetRush continues moving in this direction as well. We seem to understand that abundance is all around us, and by opening up to and showing up for that abundance, we can increase it rather than just taking it away from others. We are connecting our systems to the systems of clients who share our values and want to create more dynamic and collaborative commerce: better products in more ethical ways. And we’re directly supporting nonprofits and foundations, amplifying their impact with our craft under the banner of services we call “Good Things.”

This post is about seeing the rainforest through the trees — the birds eye-view if you will. Our evolution as a company in a landscape of companies is inspired by this very new and yet ancient way of organizing. I have shared only the very beginning of an unfolding story about how one organization continues to evolve and create itself. Learning what SweetRush has to offer the world around it and the people who comprise it has been an epic journey on many levels, yet at the same time, always feels like the start of a new adventure.

Enjoy this article? We’re so glad you did. Read more and connect with our CEO Andrei Hedstrom on LinkedIn!

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I have been in the training industry for more than a decade, and I also have a long-standing personal interest in corporate sustainability and responsibility (CSR). So, naturally, as I’ve watched the CSR field develop, I ask myself this question: How can the training function support CSR initiatives?

The good news is that there is a huge opportunity for training to support CSR goals, and for CSR to enrich corporate training and communications. The bad news is that very few companies seem to be picking up on this opportunity. The HR–CSR link has only been recently receiving any attention, mostly thanks to the work of Elaine Cohen. I see it as two people who are perfect for each other, but don’t quite realize it yet — and I’m playing a sort of organizational-development Cupid. 🙂

CSR Needs Training

Traditionally, the training function lives within HR departments, with a focus on training to support new hires, compliance, product training, and continuing education. Businesses are recognizing the value of linking training functions directly to initiatives and business units, but this change is still a pendulum swinging back and forth within many organizations. CSR, as a newer function for many businesses, tends to remain isolated from the key work functions it needs to engage with to succeed. Companies often designate a sustainability officer or team to achieve goals such as charitable contributions, volunteering, green supply chains, and green office practices. Without solid cross-functional collaboration and implementation support, however, these programs can’t thrive.

The result is that employees are not fully engaged in CSR-related efforts, making lasting behavior-change difficult. Companies lose the chance to engage employees with CSR’s deeper, value-based messages, which have been shown to increase an intrinsic connection to a work community. When you add well-executed training and implementation support to the equation, however, those messages reach their audience, and suddenly the ROI of CSR is much stronger.

This is evidenced by a recent conversation I had with a team lead for sustainability consulting at a Big 4 firm. He shared that 90 percent of the deliverables their team proposes to support CSR strategy for clients are communications and training deliverables. Ninety percent! It’s as though CSR just described the man of her dreams, and his name is Training, and he’s been there down the hall in HR all along… Tweeeetawoooooo!

Training Needs CSR

There is also a need for what we call “meaning of work” support for training programs. This can be thought of as bringing the CSR spirit — or the “we care” ethos, as we call it here at SweetRush — into every training experience. CSR frequently seeks to drive changes related to culture and value systems, and it is precisely when we connect the best values of an organization with the best values of its stakeholders that we see synergies that are win-win for all parties.

For example, in a current, large-scale project that impacts front-line associates in a retail environment, we have the opportunity to increase the company’s revenue through a new training curriculum. On the surface, this could be straightforward sales training. In our approach, though, we factor in that people perform better when they have more meaning and purpose in their lives. By connecting their work to the larger impact of CSR-related initiative — integrating it through learning content, quizzes, games, CSR-related rewards, and SPIFs (rewards programs) — we offer something much deeper and more valuable. Employees get the message that by doing their job better, they are making the world a better place.

Training programs are often vulnerable to being dismissed as boring or even a waste of time. Yet the opportunity to offer deeply transformative experiences for employees and organizations alike is available, especially when you link engaging learning with the meaning of work.

Organizations should take every opportunity available to share their values through training and communication. Every training course or event can be made more effective by engaging the learner in the larger purpose of their learning experience and their work function, and of their employer’s positive social contribution. The way we see it, training — more than any other way of sharing these values — has the most impact. Why? Because the values are presented within the context of the learners’ day-to-day jobs, the skills they need to succeed in those jobs, and the policies and procedures that support the organization as a whole.

To this end, SweetRush has made it part of our practice to include the connection of meaning and purpose at work within our instructional design approach. We have found, both for ourselves and for our clients, a genuine excitement when we bring this level of thinking and connectedness to the values of their organization. In the Cupid metaphor, we’re that Training guy crushing on the cute gal in CSR: She’s starting to notice us, and we’re feeling giddy.

CSR and Training: A Happy Union
When people are a part of an organization and are working to be good corporate citizens, they feel proud to be associated with the company and to have an opportunity to share that pride in doing good things. It brings a deeper connectedness to the entire organization.

When we get a chance to both learn and connect to the more meaningful aspects of our work and the organizations we serve, we get to experience ourselves in our finest expressions. Or put more simply: True love brings out the best in us. 🙂