One of the best benefits of owning your own business is being able to be involved in your community. Creating great corporate social responsibility (CSR) allows your organization’s employees to become actively involved in the community. Not only does this get them out of the office and doing different things, but it also helps drive overall employee engagement at your organization.
Employee engagement helps the overall health and well-being of the organization. Engaged employees will go the extra mile to make sure the organization is productive and completing tasks on time. If your employees are not emotionally connected to your organization, they will not actively engage in being actively involved in the community.
A company who advocates for their community through CSR will have more positive engagement than companies who do not actively support events and causes in their community. Research has shown that fewer than 10 percent of midsized companies that are involved in their community use it as a way to drive employee engagement. Most companies do not have dedicated resources to monitor or manage their CSR related initiatives and without dedicated resources or strategies to achieve employee engagement. While it’s easy for some companies to engage in “checkbook philanthropy,” just writing a check to a community cause provides little to no opportunity also to involve your employees.
While you do not need to create an entire department dedicated to creating volunteering causes, creating a corporate social responsibility committee will allow you to get your employees involved in the leg work with finding causes your organization can focus on. Creating a CSR committee allows your employees to rally behind causes that become more personal to them and also helps build camaraderie throughout your organization. Being part of a team that develops relationships outside of the office will also help make your organization more purpose-driven.
Everyone deserves to be apart of a happy, healthy and thriving community and becoming involved is just one of the ways to start making sure this happens within your organization. Whether your organization is already actively involved in the community or you are looking for ways to become involved, reaching out to non-profits in your community is a great place to start.