Making a difference

This is a story from an associate of mine from across cyberspace. His name is Unnikrishnan Meladi and he is a consultant in People Management and Learning in India.

Born in 1964 in West Hill, Kerala, Unnikrishnan is a passionate student of human behaviour and people management. He has seen the turbulence of high seas with the Indian Navy as a Chief Petty Officer till 1998. Thereafter, he closely worked with few Governors of Indian States as an Officer till 2005. He voluntarily left government services and joined various market leaders in automotive industry in Karnataka as their HR Head. He recently authored “LEAD” –‘Successful Lessons for People Managers’. The book is the result of his people management thoughts and essentially on human relations and integrates CSR themes. You can contact Unni by email.

Here is his story:

"Somewhere in 2004, my friend Raju Gowda who was running a computer institute asked if I could conduct few English training classes for the teachers in a nearby Kannada medium village school. I was busy working with an automotive industry as their HR manager located near a village bordering Karnataka.

Initially I was hesitant because of my busy work schedule with the industry. But when Mr. Raju told me that these teachers are from a Kannada medium school and their proficiency in English is average, it stirred my social instinct of doing something for the society around our industry. It was rather a brutal execution of my commitment towards the society from where I earn my bread and butter. So, why not spend some time for these teachers from the rural areas of the state? I have always held teachers and doctors in high esteem because to two factors. It is my strong belief that the teachers are the people who shape up the future of our children and the doctors are the life savers after the juggernaut. Even though, these days, we hear a lot about degradation of these values in their noble professions my high regard has not altered.

Somehow, I agreed to conduct a 30 days program with a 45 hours syllabus absolutely free of cost. The sessions were held mostly on Saturday evenings and Sundays. Before I go on with the training sessions, I shall delve in to the benefits I derived from these teachers. I realised, with great pleasure, their social psyche and attitudinal behaviour towards their profession and the English language in particular. One thing common with all of these female teachers was that most of them were from the remote and agricultural belts located near Chickamaglur and Shimoga of Karnataka state.

In my first session, I realised that they never got an opportunity to sharpen their language skills after their formal education. I could see a wide gap between the education and training as in HR parlance. Another reason was most of them were housewives and the bread winners of the family trying to their meet domestic and professional challenges together. They needed a thorough repainting (not brushing) of their grammar and vocabulary as it was quite ‘average’."

Unnikrishnan's contribution has made a great different to the lives of many people. This just goes to show how simple acts of selflessness and volunteering in a work context can be immensely rewarding and also help build communities.

Thank you to Unnikrishnan for sending me his story!

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainability Reporter, HR Professional, Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices.  Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen  on Twitter or via my website www.b-yond.biz/en

CSR and employee engagement in Peru

I am always happy to hear from readers of my blogs and this time, I received a very positive story of CSR and employee engagement from Elliot Carmean of AMGlobal Consulting and Sarah Hahn of Waggoner Edstrom Worldwide.

This is what they wrote:

"Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) often overlook Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), assuming that a program of social outreach falls solely in the realm of large organizations and is therefore beyond their reach. However, SMEs have much to gain from CSR initiatives, and in some ways can benefit more directly and in less time than larger organizations. The key lies in connecting a company’s core business with its core target markets and its most important ambassadors – its own employees.

Results show that CSR efforts are most successful when they are aligned with the core business of a company. However, often the most organic way to make CSR effective, efficient, business-driven is to use a participatory approach in which employees of all levels take part in the design and implementation of a firm’s CSR initiatives.

Employee engagement is an untapped resource that adds authenticity to CSR, is a very cost effective way of creating change, and can lead to new and creative solutions. Small companies in particular can easily find ways to leverage their relationship with their employees to positively impact their communities. After all, relationships at a small company – between management and employees, between employees and the markets they serve – are more intimate. Employees can function as ambassadors to the streets outside the factory gate, as they know what their communities need and want.

Employee engagement was at the center of a forward-thinking CSR program designed by AMGlobal Consulting for Comercia, a medium-sized distribution company based in Peru, privately owned, with less than 500 employees. Comercia was emerging from a period of change, with new management, ambitious goals for increasing sales and reducing employee turnover, and little budget for marketing its products. The company needed to connect more with its customers and employees.

AMGlobal designed a program that, over the course of just a few months, reached out to Comercia’s workers, clients, managers, and suppliers to create an inclusive CSR initiative that covered all of these pain points at the same time. The key to this process was communication, beginning with soliciting suggestions and feedback from employees and rewarding them for ideas used, practices that are still not common in Latin America. Simple, inexpensive, non-traditional channels of communication like internal surveys, suggestion boxes, an online company newsletter allowed management to work more closely with employees to create an appropriate CSR program for Comercia’s needs.The program was designed with ongoing employee feedback and included volunteer opportunities based on the nutrition of the company’s own products. The program quickly became a source of pride and a cause of enthusiasm for employees, creating real improvements in morale and employee satisfaction.

Employee engagement continued through subsequent stages. With the close of phase one of the program, management of the initiative was transferred to a new team that included fewer managers and more workers from different levels of the company, leading to greater sustainability. The process provided new leadership opportunities within the firm while raising the profile of Comercia and its sales team in their communities. In areas where these programs have taken place, sales are up more than 30%, workers are happier and more engaged, and the company is poised for future growth. Read more about this project here .

To date, hundreds of families have been reached with nutrition education and have received food donations and nutrition information from the company. New people continue to rotate into the team so that it becomes yet more dynamic and increasingly sustainable, as well as reaching more people within the company. Employees are participating in the program at high rates and have had the ability to be involved in decision making, including employees not traditionally in management positions. The program also developed more two-way internal communication  including an internal company website, suggestion boxes, a company newsletter, and concrete inclusion of comments and suggestions from the employees about business and social practices, all of which have become an integral part of internal and external relations.

The employee engagement model of CSR is highly replicable and is of huge value to SMEs, especially in emerging markets where CSR is still relatively new and must demonstrate quick returns in order to justify funding. Integral to that success is an ongoing dialogue with all levels of employees and the community. By connecting to the bottom line and to employees from the start, soliciting feedback and using the information to design a meaningful CSR program, SME’s like Comercia can create a positive, sustainable impact.

I asked Elliot about how they measured outcomes of this project i.e. given all of this investment in nutrition education, was there any evidence that people were improving their nutritional intake and health ? Elliot replied as follows:

In order to teach the people about nutrition and provide real expertise in this area, the program brought in a local nutrition institute as a partner. They track health and nutrition levels across the city, but these are long-term issues that involve ongoing measurement and it is too early to have long-term data. We did both pre- and post-program surveys measuring the participants knowledge of nutrition issues, and these surveys showed real improvement as a result of the seminars they attended. The program is too new to be able to evaluate longer-term effects on nutritional behavior, but it was clear that the messages of the programs were being received."

I liked this story. It is probably representative of many initiatives to engage employees through the prism of CSR and I am convinced that there is benefit here. In the case of Comercia, it was much more than a necessity. It was about survival, or sustainability, of the company.

Thanks to Elliot and Sarah for contributing this case study.



elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainabilty Reporter, HR Professional, Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices.  Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen  on Twitter or via my website www.b-yond.biz/en

4 good resources for Employee volunteering programs

Employee volunteering programs (EVP's) are an excellent way to engage employees and reap benefits for the business, the organization, teams and individuals, whilst having a positive impact on the community. Here are some excellent resources that help us understand the link between HR, CSR, and EVP. Some older, some newer, but all offering interesting perspectives.

Volunteering - The business case (published May 2010)
Produced by corporate Citizenship for the City of London, looking at corporate volunteering in education. Very rich document with research results and insights from several Companies.

The Benefits of Employee Volunteer Programs (published 2009)
Produced by JA - Junior Achievement - documents the different aspects of employee volunteering and provides intersting data about volunteering programs.

Deloitte IMPACT Survey Executive Summary 2008
Looks at how companies are not leveraging the value of corporate volunteering in many different ways.

Chris Jarvis's Blog
Chris is the undoubted world expert on Corporate Volunteering he writes a blog which is packed with information and insights about EVP's. Chris and partner Angela also collaborated with me on the writing of the Employee Volunteering chapter of CSHR - the forthcoming book! Watch this space!

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainabilty reporter, HR professional. Contact me via @elainecohen on Twitter or via my website www.b-yond.biz/en