How Employee Recognition Can Boost Your CSR Program

Studies show that effective employee recognition and corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs both help to boost employee morale.

Employees want to work for a company who connects them to a purpose and allow them opportunities to give back to the causes they’re passionate about.

A recent UnitedHealth Group Health & Volunteering Study showed that people who volunteer report that they feel better emotionally, mentally and physically and another study from the University of Georgia Terry College of Business revealed that employee volunteering is linked to greater workplace productivity & satisfaction.

A common challenge that companies face when implementing a CSR program is getting more employees to participate. One solution to this is to use employee recognition to help motivate employees across the organization.

When companies reward employees for good work, it reinforces that behavior and sets the foundation for positive future performance.

  Employee Recognition Tips to Boost Participation in your CSR program

Create Social Media All-Stars- Use your organization’s social media channels post event to post pics of employees volunteering and thank them publicly.

Recognize Leaders- Hype up leaders by giving them recognition from the executive team before, during and after the fact using all available communication channels including your social recognition platform. Have leaders tell stories of how the charities they’ve chosen to volunteer with have impacted their lives.

Empower New Leaders- Create leadership committees where employees can set up their own volunteer groups with specific causes. Fuel a culture of recognition by providing these volunteer groups with ways to give peer to peer recognition to one another.

Be Creative with your Awards- Provide incentives to all employees who participate. One example could be if you use a point system you could award points so the employee can redeem them for something they choose.

Have an Awards Event- Have a competition between departments where the winning team will get a fun prize. You could even do an awards event and pass out awards to the person who volunteered the most or feel free to create your own categories to award.

Get Feedback- Be sure to ask for suggestions from your employees as to how they would like to be recognized and awarded for their service.

3 CSR Tips from Causecast CEO-Ryan Scott

Empower your employees. One of the best ways you can recognize your employees through CSR is to recognize their personal cause passions. Build a CSR program that offers unlimited individual volunteer opportunities while also creating room for employees to participate in the shaping of company campaigns as much as they’d like. Higher volunteer participation is correlated with increased employee engagement, so offer as many on-ramps for participation as your program will allow.

Get the C-suite involved.  Employees can smell the difference between lip service and the real deal, and that starts with leadership.  Make sure that senior executives are on board with your company’s campaigns and are rolling up their sleeves to work side by side with employees at all levels.

Focus on impact. When it comes to CSR, the rewards that employees will value most are the ones they see showing up in the real world. Volunteering for the sake of volunteering isn’t enough; make sure you work closely with nonprofits to understand their needs (not yours) and set goals around your activities that extend over a period of time.  

Corporate Social Responsibility & Recognition at MTM

In honor of Volunteer Recognition Day & National Volunteer Week, we at MTM Recognition want to say we’re so proud of our employees for serving with us year after year to support several different causes including Special Olympics.

In fact, now is the time of year that our MTM team is gearing up for a community 5K race called Run for Recognition whose proceeds benefit Special Olympics Oklahoma. We’ve been putting on this race for five years, and it’s exciting to see our employees and the community so involved.

To reward our employees, we make special volunteer t-shirts for them to wear, provide a big breakfast on race day, and award them with points through our online recognition platform to redeem for gift items.  And for those who run the race, we make specialized medals that we give to them as they cross the finish line.

We hope this gives you some ideas on how your CSR and employee recognition programs can work together to help boost employee participation. If you have any ideas that we didn’t mention, feel free to comment below.