CSR Food For Thought: It’s All About the Employees

The CSR Food for Thought series is a weekly roundup of relevant news from around the Web, presented to you in one bite-sized blog post. Follow us on Twitter for CSR news and trends throughout the week: @VM_Solutions.

The Crucial – and Underappreciated –  Role of HR in Sustainability
At VolunteerMatch, we’ve been saying this for a while: CSR should be built into the very core of a company. An important part of achieving this is to include CSR in your employee recruitment and onboarding processes. This post from MIT Sloan Management Review challenges companies to do better at incorporating CSR into their HR practices. They advocate for a quadruple bottom line – people, planet, profit, and community impact. We couldn’t agree more!

Cisco Employee Volunteers Help a Texas Family Rebuild
Cisco has partnered with Habitat for Humanity for decades. But for Cisco Project Manager Beth Kolman, this time was different. In this post, she conveys how she was moved by the experience of attending a groundbreaking ceremony with fellow employees and hearing directly from the family they were helping. At VolunteerMatch, we love hearing stories like this. Offering fulfilling volunteer opportunities is a great way to keep your employees happy.

Supercharge Your CSR Commitments through Employee Engagement
As this Triple Pundit article puts it, “Happy employees usually equal profitable companies”. It gives numerous examples (summarized from the Conference Board of Canada’s recent CSR Summit) of companies supercharging their CSR by following this advice: Start at the top, get employee buy-in and participation, tell awesome stories, and assemble a great team.

13 Disturbing Facts about Employee Engagement [Infographic]
Don’t let this scary-sounding infographic from The Huffington Post’s blog get you down. Yes, it shows that employee engagement, overall, is low. But it also shows how much room there is for improvement, how much we have to gain from investing in employee engagement, and how much potential exists to make your company stand out from the crowd.