How CHROs Help Your Organization Do Good To Do Well

Creating a sustainable impact

What does serving the greater good look like for you and your organization? How might doing so benefit the members within your organization and other stakeholders outside?

CHROs help facilitate answering these questions to create growth opportunities, both for organizations and for the stakeholders they serve. For example, employee retention can increase as much as 57 percent when employees volunteer and raise funds for good causes. This matters since employee engagement remains at only 23 percent worldwide and 32 percent in the U.S. (as reported by Gallup). Improving retention can increase organization performance significantly since replacing an employee often costs between .8 to 2.0 times the employee’s annual salary along with implications for employee well-being.

Jane conducted interviews and surveys with leaders and employees to explore how best to serve the greater good. Some participants emphasized providing employees and their families with a good livelihood. Others highlighted the importance of serving the local community. Still, others expressed that addressing global issues is the key to serving the greater good.

Leaders also had diverse perspectives on how serving the greater good benefited their organizations. Sometimes they reported the positive emotions they experienced from helping others. Sometimes they discussed the benefits for employees and increased employee engagement. Sometimes they linked the benefits of serving the greater good to improved financial performance.

What was conclusive among leaders was the agreement that serving the greater good in some way yielded some sort of benefit for their organizations.

“Doing good” goes by many names: social responsibility, social citizenship, sustainable development goals, social impact, effective altruism, purpose-driven organization, positive organization, triple bottom line, philanthropy, and so forth. 

“Doing well” refers to the value that an organization creates for all stakeholders: employee well-being and productivity, strategic realization, customer share, investor confidence, community reputation, etc. As one second-order meta-analysis with a sample size of one million observations, asserts: “. . . the business case for being a good firm is undeniable.”

We suggest that business and HR leaders connect ”doing good” and “doing well” into a common mindset. Consider how your organization’s commitment to citizenship, whatever that might look like, may increase value to all stakeholders.

Create the Right “Do Good to Do Well” Mindset

We propose that the mindset of doing good matters to doing well. In the assessment in Figure 1, you can see six levels of commitment to doing good. Each mindset indicates a potential for positive outcomes. The assessment diagnoses which focus and level of commitment to doing good will lead to the desired do well results, identifying sustainable and impactful links between doing good and doing well.
            

Mindset (Commitment Level)	Characteristics	Diagnostic question To what extent do we engage in doing good because:	Assess 1–10
1. Have To	Focus on self-interest Spend money Broadcast efforts	We are required to do so by regulation and social pressure?
2. Want To	Focus on other services Emphasize philanthropy Become community citizen	We believe in giving back to the communities where we live and work?
3. Willing to Grow	Focus on personal commitment to help others Overcome personal limitations with a commitment to helping others	We know that helping others helps us grow personally?
4. Develop Capabilities	Focus on creating an organization competence or culture of caring Show evidence of the value of doing good	We want to create an organization competence or culture of doing good?
5. Collaborate	Focus on engaging employees inside and stakeholders outside in doing good effort Make doing good a shared opportunity and responsibility	We believe a shared commitment to doing good builds a positive identity with employees inside and stakeholders outside?
6. Empower Others	Focus on creating a sustainable community of doing good Make the organization’s efforts part of the community ecosystem	We understand how to lift people in ways that empower them to lift and empower others, making our communities better places to live and work?

 

Recognize the Benefits of “Do Good to Do Well”

You can discover the benefits that matter most to you and your organization through doing good. Often, the benefit of doing good comes simply from experiencing how your business can serve as an agent for world benefit and helping others. Some leaders reported that they felt they could do more good in their leadership positions within a company than they could elsewhere. They shared that as they took on this mindset, their business became a vehicle for good. They could see the good they were able to contribute to others and the positive ripple effect it had in increasing joy for both the givers and the beneficiaries.

Make Progress with Specific Actions

To make progress on the do good to do well agenda, consider which action(s) your organization might want to explore next:
 

1. Take care of your people. Commit to, invest in, and track employee experience so that employees feel cared for.
2. Invest in your local community. Become an active local community member by sponsoring, hosting, and participating in community events.     
3. Help solve global issues. Engage in global citizenship issues (e.g., UN 17 Social Development Goals) through philanthropy and employee actions.    
4. Integrate social citizenship into the business agenda. Include social responsibility discussions during presentations on other business issues (cash flow, profitability, market value, customer share, innovation). Do not let ‘do good to do well’ be a stand-alone agenda.
5. Lead by example. Leaders show personal passion for doing good through their rhetoric and actions. They share their personal experiences with philanthropy with humility.
6. Engage others in the do good to do well agenda. Employees may get engaged by being on a team that allocates resources to good causes.    Customers may be involved by including them in the projects or initiatives. One firm chose to focus philanthropy work on energy and water since these were issues their customers were worried about. Leaders can involve investors by sharing with them the initiatives and the intangible benefits of being seen as a giving organization. Communities become involved as the organizations’ service sponsors community events and build a more positive place to live.     
7. Appropriately publicize the good works. We need to strike a balance between over-promoting and under-reporting: too much publicity will likely lead to cynicism, yet no knowledge of what is done hides impact. Sharing stories and examples of service without flowery rhetoric helps others see the good works. Sharing the motivation behind the service and saying why some initiatives are chosen over others can also be helpful.
8. Institutionalize the commitment to social citizenship. Weave citizen behaviors and actions into who is hired and promoted, how and why people are paid, what training employees receive, and how and what the organization communicates.     
9. Make the connection. Link the commitment to serving the greater good to not only the noble purpose but also the results that occur.     
10. Make it personal. Get to know the people you help. Share stories with employees about your company’s impact.

CHROs have a unique opportunity to help organizations do good to do well. 

	Jane Day, Ph.D., is a Partner at Strategic Leadership Partners.
	Dave Ulrich is the Rensis Likert Professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, and a Partner at the RBL Group.