Turning employees into sustainable assets

What would profit and loss statements look like if they included factors like employee happiness, retention, job referrals and volunteerism?

In 1999, management guru Peter Drucker predicted the shift in the importance of a company's most valuable resources.

"The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company was its production equipment," Drucker wrote. "The most valuable asset of a 21st-century institution, whether business or non-business, will be its knowledge workers and their productivity."

德鲁克（Drucker）的理论可能是针对会计师和投资者的，但我认为它有效地适用于公司的人力资源部门及其志愿者计划经理，社区关系官员和工作场所提供高管。

AtEarthSharewe take pride in working with our partner companies on prioritizing employee happiness and satisfaction. We reach them through creative volunteerism opportunities and innovative ways to keep them informed and educated about the causes and issues that touch them most closely.

Here's what we've learned about how volunteer programs can boost the bottom line.

Connecting Volunteerism with the Balance Sheet

The success of a corporate volunteer program is typically measured through the number of hours contributed, the number of participants, how many nonprofit organizations benefited and the amount of money raised.

但是，从本质上讲，公司正在衡量该计划吸引了多少员工以及这些员工如何选择参加。最重要的是，他们还试图评估社区参与的重要性是否引起了员工的共鸣以及计划的影响。

这基本上是关于量化成功的。例如，公司可以将志愿者计划宣布为成功，例如，如果员工能够筹集一定数量的资金来协助亚马逊的非营利组织，或者贡献了一定的时间来种植树木，建造游乐场或修复森林。这使该计划成为受影响社区以及公司的资产。对于公司而言，它有助于提高其声誉，品牌知名度和员工满意度。

Photo of man at computer由...提供德米特里·雪玉米夫（Dmitriy Shironosov）via Shutterstock

Green Teams: Shifting Mindsets, Crowdsourcing Solutions

帮助高管改变他们关于如何表征资产和负债的心态，并确定位置工作场所捐赠，志愿服务，社区参与和可持续性竞彩足球app怎么下载fall in the profit-and-loss spectrum -- EarthShare convenes Green Team meetings in several major markets.

The focus of these meetings is to allow change leaders to meet in a safe zone to discuss challenges (such as lack of buy-in from executive leadership, low employee engagement, budget cuts, lack of information, too much conflicting information, etc.), crowdsource solutions to those challenges and discuss emerging issues in sustainability and the environment.

"Without these metrics to measure ourselves against, we’d only have donors and dollars, and no context," Wells Fargo's Peter Dudley wrote in March onCSRwire's顶嘴.

"Ultimately, we would fall into the all-too-common trap ofmanaging to the available measurements,"达德利继续."While presenting successful results in the short run, [that] could be very detrimental to the powerful culture of involvement we’re trying to foster over the long term."

Often, however, these meetings evolve into discussions about how sustainability managers canengage their employees in understanding these causes and taking action. As the meetings strive to provide more tools to participants, they’ve also evolved as a venue for dissecting employee engagement. With many of these managers wearing multiple hats, employee engagement becomes one of many responsibilities -- which can prohibit the company from investing more time in developing such programs.

Making Connections

"We got involved in theEarthShare Green Team Networkbecause of the access they provide to peers and other sustainability professionals across industries. What makes the meetings truly valuable is that the attendees decide the agenda," said Tyler Daluz, vice president for sustainability communications at Citi.

"That makes it easy for us to talk about our challenges and share different approaches with the objective of learning from each other's experiences," Daluz added.

What emerges time and again is for the need for information that educates employees and makes it easy for them to identify with the volunteer program.

"These meetings are time well spent for us. EarthShare is a crucial connector and facilitator for our team in understanding environmental issues and giving us the right information to bring to our employees," Daluz said.

Engagement at Work

Research backs up what Daluz and other attendees of our Green Team meetings often indicate. According to a recent survey by咨询公司Aon和Orenda Connecting，每三名员工中有两个因公司的捐赠计划而感到更加参与工作。Cone Inc.的类似研究回应了以下发现：28％的参与公司事业计划的员工更有可能为其公司的价值感到自豪，而36％的人更有可能感受到强烈的公司忠诚感。与未参与的员工相比。

以及不参与的第一原因（29％引用）？缺乏足够或相关的机会。

那么，断开连接在哪里？为什么公司未能将员工与机会真正利用他们的动机，能量和创造力来创造积极变革的机会 - 以及将思维方式转移到将员工的幸福，保留，职位推荐和志愿服务视为资产中？

As we facilitate these Green Team meetings, one thing is clear: While we can help companies connect with a variety of causes and nonprofit organizations, management's real fulfillment comes when they see employee engagement increasing through these programs as well as witnessing the impact of that engagement firsthand.

Once that engagement is integrated into corporate culture, it will be become impossible for companies to account for their employees as anything less than prized assets.