Category: SweetRush Culture

A Match Made in Heaven: Integrating CSR and Training

by Andrei Hedstrom

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. 🙂

Does Your Training Have Meaning?

by Catherine Davis

The article is the result of a collaborative inquiry begun by our Good Things Initiative team leaders Andrei Hedstrom and Brooking Gatewood. Together we have worked to integrate a meaning of work aspect into our training designs where-ever possible. Read on to find out why we are so excited about this win-win training solution!

Today in the U.S., people are expressing their concern and caring about the planet and about corporate citizenship. They want their work to have purpose and meaning, and they want to work in organizations that are purpose-driven and that value sustainability. According to a recent article in Forbes magazine, 20 percent of Fortune 500 companies will become mission-driven companies. Many businesses are going back to their roots. They are no longer solely focused on making a profit. Instead, they are focusing more on how to use their organizational resources, skills, and power to give back to the community.

Employees Demand Meaningful Work

One of the key drivers of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities is employee demand. Employees want meaningful jobs. This is especially true for Millennials. Companies that provide meaningful work have loyal employees. Their employees are also more engaged in their work. Of employees who are satisfied with their employer’s CSR activities, 86 percent have high levels of engagement (Sirota, 2007).

A 2011 Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) study notes these top benefits of CSR:

  1. Improved employee morale
  2. More efficient business processes
  3. Stronger public image
  4. Increased employee loyalty
  5. Increased brand recognition

In that same study, 49 percent of company leaders said CSR was very important for attracting top talent, and 40 percent said the same for employee retention. As more Millennials enter the workforce, these numbers are only going to increase.

Given how important CSR is for employee engagement, and how valuable engaged employees are for the bottom line, it’s quite surprising that companies are not communicating to their own employees about all the Good Things they’re doing! A 2010 PSR branding survey indicated that more than half of employees did not know whether or not their company had CSR practices! This gap between employee engagement and CSR can be bridged with good training.

Emotional Connection is a Win-Win For Companies and Their Employees

At SweetRush, we’re excited about this trend. Bringing CSR and meaningful work into our training programs is a win-win opportunity. From the learning and training perspective, learners who are emotionally connected to content learn and retain more. An emotional connection makes learning “stick,” and awareness about a company’s sustainability, responsibility, and citizenship creates positive emotions in employees. Incorporating this awareness into training helps to emotionally engage employees in the learning experience and, more broadly, in their job. Believing that their work supports the greater good is also good for employee morale.

How to Integrate “The Meaning of Work” into Training

SweetRush strives to make an emotional connection with every training program we design. Part of the SweetRush methodology is a values-based approach to instructional design: We identify meaning and purpose that can help learners connect with their work and the learning experience. SweetRush integrates the “meaning of the work” aspect into our training projects whenever possible. Some areas we address include:

  • How do the organization’s products or services provide benefit to people, the environment, or the community?
  • How is the organization involved in corporate social responsibility initiatives, such as safety, environmental resources, and local community issues?
  • How can the content of the training help the employee contribute to the greater good?

Whether they are developing e-learning, instructor-led, or virtual training programs, SweetRush instructional designers and project managers collaborate with our clients to bring CSR to life within our courses. Are you ready to take this step with us?

Photo Credit: HASLOO via Compfight cc

 

Thumbs Up: Good Things come in all sizes

by Andrei Hedstrom

We are excited to share the second in our “Thumbs Up” series, where we promote a handful of recent stories of positive social impact that have inspired us. In each series, we pick a theme for ways to make a difference, find our featured stories, and put our design team to work bringing these stories to life with our fun, hand-puppet-themed, HTML storyboard interface.

Last year, we focused on stories of regular people making simple choices to do good things that ended up inspiring others — us included. This year, our stories feature how businesses of all shapes and sizes — from small start-ups to the world’s largest retailers — have used their existing talents and expertise for social and environmental benefit. There were many great stories we could have chosen, but our feature picks this year came from Bridgestone Tires, Honest by, Walmart, Nokero, Good World Games, and social-media fundraising sensation Laina Walker.

You can read all about those stories on our Thumbs Up page. Here we want to highlight some of the many other stories of businesses doing Good Things that we came across in our research. Let’s start at the bottom of things — feet! Toms Shoes has pioneered a simple but powerful social business model: With their “one for one” movement, they commit to giving away one product (in their case, a pair of shoes to barefoot children in need) for every product they sell. A similar model has been employed by United by Blue, a sustainable apparel company that removes one pound of trash from the ocean for every item sold. And speaking of creative ways that businesses can help remove trash from the ocean, this year the cleaning-product company Method launched a new bottle line made of a combination of post-consumer recycled plastic and plastic waste recovered from the ocean, turning very problematic ocean trash into a hip and marketable resource.

And, as a final shout out, much like our featured social change teenager, Laina Walker, grade-schoolers with Internet access can have a powerful impact too! This last year, a class of fourth-grade students found it odd that the new Universal Studios-produced Lorax movie has no information to promote environmental stewardship on its website. So, they started a petition to get the company to walk the walk that this movie talks. These kids, their teacher, and their change.org petition managed to mobilize more than 50,000 signatures, and it worked: Universal Studios now has a prominet truffula tree on the movie’s homepage, linking to an assortment of green educational tips, games, and organizations doing good work to save the trees. Score one for the little guys — literally. 🙂

At SweetRush, we are believers in the power of both individuals and businesses to do Good Things for people and the planet, and we love sharing these stories to help spread the word and celebrate other companies’ successes. As e-learning and communications experts, sharing these stories is part of our own way of doing Good Things.

So check it out and share the love: Thumbs Up: Good Things come in all sizes.

Hidden Gems: Communication and Training as Key to Successful Sustainability Programs

by Andrei Hedstrom

We don’t need to spend much time persuading you that a clear commitment to sustainability is essential for business success. Research has made this case in many ways, and one of our favorites is Bob Willard’s “seven bottom-line benefits of sustainability practices for business”:

  1. Increase revenue.
  2. Reduce energy expenses.
  3. Reduce waste expenses.
  4. Reduce materials and water expenses.
  5. Increase employee productivity.
  6. Reduce hiring and attrition expenses.
  7. Reduce strategic and operational risks.

We recommend checking out Bob Willard’s website for more information and data on the profit benefits of business sustainability.

What’s less well known is that sound communication and training are essential to effectively implement your sustainability and CSR projects. There are three main stakeholders with whom this plays out:

  1. Employees
  2. Vendors
  3. Customers

1. Employee communication. One little-known weakness in standard business sustainability practice is ineffective communication of these practices internally. Especially given that two of the main ROI benefits of CSR relate to employee productivity and retention: making sure your employees know all the good things you’re doing as a business is essential for effective ROI on your CSR investments. Yet the recent 2012 McKinsey Annual Survey highlights this weakness: “Companies are still not doing much to integrate sustainability into their internal communications or employee engagement.” When your employees know all the good things you are up to as a business, it increases their productivity and retention rates, which saves you money. That money can be reinvested into strengthening your CSR programs even more. It’s a win-win cycle.

Petco®, for example, has recently made a strategic commitment to offering a huge line of natural products in their stores. Because employee training and communication is our core competency, Petco hired SweetRush to help with these internal communications to ensure the success of this commitment. We have worked with them on employee-targeted communications for this project in three main areas: First, we’ve co-created communications directed at senior leadership to solidify the sound strategic reasoning for this shift in the product line. Second, we’ve worked with Petco on new-product training for in-store employees to learn about these new products they sell. Third, we have created general employee training materials with Petco, which highlight their social and environmental commitments, so all employees can understand and feel good about the company’s strong CSR commitments. These investments have supported the success of this new product line, the satisfaction of employees, and in turn, the viability of continued sustainability-focused strategy for the company.

2. Vendor communication. For companies that rely on external vendors to meet sustainability and ethical standards, this area is hugely important. We all saw how Apple® received a serious reputation blow for the exposure of unethical working conditions in their supplier Foxconn’s factories, which forced Apple to improve communication and training for suppliers on appropriate fair labor standards — with still mixed results.

One successful example of good vendor communication comes from Walmart®, a company with almost 100,000 material suppliers and a strong commitment to sustainability. Walmart understands the importance of green vendor practices for their own corporate sustainability, and in collaboration with competitors and The Sustainability Consortium, has been developing measuring and reporting standards for product sustainability. These standards apply to Walmart, its suppliers, and its suppliers’ suppliers — all the way down the supply chain to raw materials sourcing.

3. Customer communication. This important area is well-understood for any company engaged in sales, marketing, or PR. Businesses have long realized the importance of communicating with customers in such a way to encourage the purchasing of products and services. But more recently, businesses are recognizing that customers are drawn to make purchases — not just because of the quality, price, or sustainability of a product — but also for the quality and commitment to CSR of the company itself. Recent consumer surveys indicate that 40 percent of a company’s reputation with customers stems from its CSR practices and that more than half (55 percent) of customers would choose one brand over another based on the brand’s CSR practices.

Patagonia® offers an excellent example in this area. This company is one of the strongest leaders in environmental responsibility — both in its products and in its practices as a company. Patagonia is also quite vocal about communicating these values to its customers, through its Footprint Chronicles, blog and videos, and direct involvement in environmental campaigns. As a result, it has an incredibly loyal customer base and is able to charge premium prices for the material, as well as the ethical quality of its products.

Whether your company is B2B, B2C, or both, there are many ways you can strengthen the effectiveness of your sustainability endeavors by dedicating more attention to communication and training. As CSR becomes common practice, effective communication and integration of your CSR agenda become the differentiator between you and your competitors. And for us, this reality is such a win-win: We are training and communication experts with a passion for CSR and helping businesses do good things even better. There’s nothing we’d rather do than bring our skills to the table to help a company succeed with sustainability. Please call on us to help.

Forbes Top 10 CSR trends of 2012 How SweetRush Can Help
# 1. CSR increasingly includes companies’ global supply chains,
and # 9. A separate but linked trend noting how caring for Human Rights Protection across the supply chain is becoming a standard expectation.		 Training and e-learning to educate suppliers and employees on environmental and ethical supply chain standards and changes.
# 2. Transparency and honest reporting is key,

and #8. Social media used for reporting.

 Help companies impress with cutting-edge, shareable, interactive e-learning games and reports, rather than old-school PDFs.
# 3. More data on link between CSR and engaged (and productive) employees. This is a weak spot in CSR implementation, and happens to align with our sweet spot of internal employee learning, training, and engagement.
# 4. Careful CSR language this election year to avoid political pitfalls. N/A – we leave this one to the politicos. J
# 5. Collaboration is a new trend for topic-specific solutions (stopping mining, for example). Complex cross-sector collaborations often need training support. We have done similar training courses on cross-department education to support collaboration within large corporations.
# 6. Consumers concern and eco-labeling is on the rise. Consumer-targeted training and web-based education.
# 7. Companies are increasing hiring in CSR areas. CSR program-specific new-hire training.
# 10. Population growth ensures that sustainability will continue to be a key business imperative. Sustainability innovations and process improvements also continue because of effective training and communication to smooth the transitions.

Why CSR has become a hot topic in business?

by Andrei Hedstrom

We all know that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a hot topic in business in recent years. But do we all understand why?

The first reason, of course, is that there is a need: We are using resources faster than nature can replenish them. In other words, we are in resource debt, living as if we had 1.5 planets to support our endeavors when we only have one planet.

Some of us are using way more than others, and many people on this planet suffer from extreme poverty and a lack of basic resources needed to survive. (Check out this map of our ecological credit and debt, by nation, since 1960.) This situation is inherently unsustainable; that is, it cannot continue without even more dire consequences to human and ecological well-being.

The second reason is that “business as usual” is part of the problem. The neoclassical economic models we learn in school, unfortunately, propagate a destructive myth that guides corporate strategy: that resources, waste, and social impact have no economic cost. That is, the ecological (and social) costs of business practices are externalized and not included in our economic equations.

For example, DDT, a pesticide long used in agriculture, has been found to be a toxic water contaminant with long-term harm to ecosystems and human health. A large part of what CSR efforts can do is to account for these kinds of “externalities” in business decisions. Government regulation through groups such as the EPA has played a large role in this process to date, but corporations increasingly are taking responsibility for their own impact and beginning to revision their role in society as caring for all stakeholders, not just shareholders.

A third and very important reason that CSR has become a hot topic is that it is good for business! Research supports the bottom-line benefits. For example, a 2009 performance study showed that companies that mind their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) business factors exceed the S&P 500 by as much as 4.8 percent.

We all want to feel good about the work we do to make money and the companies we support when we spend it. So it’s no surprise that when companies commit to doing good in the world, it enhances customer and employee loyalty, brand value, and reputation in their communities. CSR practices can also reduce costs and risk by creating greater operational and supply chain efficiencies, and it can spawn product innovations that open new markets for companies.

Global companies reliant on complex supply chains and raw materials are themselves vulnerable to increasing costs and disruptions in their supply chains, energy use, and tighter resource regulations. If these companies want a stable future for themselves, they are recognizing that they have to help create it.

For all these reasons, corporations are beginning to think about their triple bottom line: accounting for people, planet, and profit in business decisions. Yet still, for some companies, CSR consists of volunteerism and activities to give back to the community without further questioning the operating assumptions of the core business. While these activities are often of great benefit to communities, this kind of CSR is not as powerful as when companies look more deeply at their operations and supply chain practices with environmental and social impact in mind.

As CSR scholar Stuart Hart notes, “Like it or not, the responsibility for ensuring a sustainable world falls largely on the shoulders of the world’s enterprises, the economic engines of the future.”

Corporations taking these challenges seriously are necessarily transforming themselves into a new kind of organization — one with more power than any other force in our world today to turn the tide of our social and ecological crisis and help create the foundations for a truly sustainable society. This process can entail great organizational change and require training and learning support, and that’s where we fit in. Here at SweetRush, it is our absolute honor and privilege to bring our skills in e-learning, training, and change management to help companies continue to do well while doing good.

Good Things.