Engage and Excel: How Corporate Responsibility Improves the Bottom Line

By Shannon Schuyler

Employee engagement tops many CEO agendas — not surprising, considering a more engaged workforce means better work quality and longer tenure. These benefits directly impact the bottom line, increasing productivity and efficiency and fueling innovation. Employees most committed to their organizations put in 57 percent more effort on the job and are 87 percent less likely to resign than their disengaged counterparts, according to the Corporate Executive Board.

Despite CEOs’ widespread agreement that employee engagement is highly desirable, many companies don’t deploy all available resources to foster it. Too frequently, employee engagement is siloed as a human resources (HR) function, limited to areas like professional development and compensation. Although HR has an important role to play, other crucial levers, such as corporate responsibility (CR), exist for achieving sustained employee engagement. Further emphasizing this tie-in between CR and employee engagement, a recent survey by CECP, a coalition of CEOs focused on societal investment, revealed 36 percent of CEOs said employee support would make the biggest impact on a company’s decision to expand its investment in the community.

At PwC, we recently moved beyond the usual documentation of CR efforts by measuring the employee engagement return on our CR investment. After assessing the level of CR commitment among our more than 39,000 U.S. partners and staff, we triangulated this data with performance reviews, retention and productivity. We further analyzed the results by examining market, practice area and staff class.

Generally, we found that as the level of CR activity rose, so did performance and length of tenure. Moreover, the greater employees’ CR engagement, the more likely they were to be high performers. Fifty-five percent of employees with one CR activity were high performers, with an average tenure of 6.7 years. Among employees with two or more CR activities, 60 percent were high performers, with an average tenure of 7.4 years.

Our study also showed how specific types of CR, such as nonprofit board seats, correlate with tenure. One of our partners in San Jose, California, for example, serves on the local and national boards of an organization that uses entrepreneurship to excite and propel disengaged, low-income youth through high school and into college. He recently helped facilitate a three-and-a-half month pro bono project, which included analyzing the organization’s mentor recruitment strategy and developing recommendations for improvement. The organization has implemented five of these recommendations so far, resulting in earlier recruitment of mentors and enhanced mentor experience. And we now have many more of our firm’s partners and staff volunteering as mentors with the organization.

We often see this type of two-way relationship with CR and employee engagement. Encouraged by the firm, a partner invests heavily in his board activity, leading to increased firm investment in the non-profit, and strengthening the partner’s engagement with the local office and beyond.

Our findings dispel the myth that highest achievers lack time for CR. In fact, they demonstrate that CR motivates high achievers to pitch in, and the linkage between increased firm success and CR helps fuel CR investment. This represents a marked cultural shift. In FY 2010, we found that volunteer hours were the highest on average among employees receiving the lowest ratings, and employees devoted an average of three hours to CR. Three years later, in FY 2013, average volunteer hours were highest among those receiving the top ratings, and average hours per employee had doubled.

How did we get here? First, we aim to increase employee engagement through CR initiatives that not only meet important community needs, but also build on shared values, tap in-house experience and provide opportunities for leadership and growth.

Second, to foster engagement through CR, we focus heavily on enabling our workforce. We want our people’s engagement to fit their work and home life, and to provide maximum benefits from participation. Our efforts would backfire if, for example, we asked our people to teach financial literacy but penalized employees for time away from the office, created programs that lacked skill-building opportunities, or pushed our people to devote time to a CR program that was unimportant to them.

Companies that embrace the notion of 100 percent CR engagement must embed CR in every facet of their employees’ experience: from onboarding to milestone courses, to performance and planning discussions, and even into the alumni ranks. This process also must take into account geography, line of business, gender and minority diversity, and level.

Being a good corporate citizen and leveraging CR to maximize employee engagement are imperatives for today’s companies. Driving business value while bettering society is an opportunity the business community can’t afford to pass up.

Image credit: PwC

Shannon Schuyler is a Principal and CR Leader at PwC, as well as a member of PwC’s Global CR Board and President of the PwC Charitable Foundation, Inc. To learn more about PwC’s approach to fostering employee engagement to drive Corporate Responsibility, see  “The Keys to Corporate Responsibility Employee Engagement.”