How Might Serving the Greater Good Help Your Organization?

by Jane Day, Ph.D. Fellow, Case Western Reserve University; Partner, Strategic Leadership Partners ([email protected] ) and Dave Ulrich, Rensis Likert Professor, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan; Partner, The RBL Group ([email protected] )

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

Answering these questions holds great opportunities for growth, 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.

After years of consulting on personal well-being and strategic leadership, Jane pursued her Ph.D., interviewing and surveying leaders and employees to define ways of serving the greater good. Some said it is giving employees and their families a good livelihood. Others felt it is serving within the local community. Others expressed that it is helping to solve global issues.

Leaders also varied on how serving the greater good benefitted their organizations. Sometimes they reported the positive emotions they personally 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 is 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

Based on Jane’s and others’ research, we propose that the mindset for 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.

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 the ways in which your business can serve as an agent for world benefit and helping others. Some leaders in our study 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 member of your local community 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 discussions of social responsibility 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 by 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 builds 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.
11. Your ideas?

We would love for you to share your own experiences! How does your organization seek to serve the greater good and in what ways does this be help the members inside your organizations and stakeholders outside?

Dave Ulrich?is the Rensis Likert Professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, and a partner at The RBL Group , a consulting firm focused on helping organizations and leaders deliver value.