Corporate community responsibility
Business in the Community’s Northern Ireland Chair, Paul Rooney, talks to Peter Cheney about how BITC builds partnerships between good citizen companies and local communities. Putting good intentions into practice, he argues, actually engages and motivates a post-recession workforce.
Doing good for the local community can be every bit as beneficial for the business, in Paul Rooney’s view. Since last July the PricewaterhouseCoopers partner has chaired Business in the Community in Northern Ireland, bridging the expertise of its 230-plus member companies, with schools, community groups and voluntary organisations across Northern Ireland.
Inspire, engage and challenge
BITC’s three-fold aim is to inspire, engage and challenge, and for Rooney, all three are critical to making the partnership work.
“Inspiration in a post-recession landscape helps businesses face the new challenges and give hope to people and communities struggling to recover from the recessionary impacts,” he comments.
Engagement for Paul Rooney means more than simply engaging with outside organisations; he argues passionately that encouraging employees and managers to help deliver successful community projects, boosts morale and builds real three-way engagement between workers, employer and community. “Staff morale, self-confidence and pride are all drivers of workforce engagement and productivity; where there is corporate responsibility everyone’s a winner.”
From his own firm’s experience, he points to partnership between PwC and two primary schools. PwC staff helped the schools promote themselves in their communities; designing brochures, website development and even improving internal school design. PwC also makes its facilities available for their teachers and volunteering programmes encourage its staff to go out to help children improve literacy and numeracy attainment.
Rooney also meets the school principals regularly to discuss the non-educational challenges they face. “Where businesses engage directly with their local community, there are real and direct benefits for everyone,” he says. “Community organisations need the practical help and experience that these ‘challenge days’ can bring while sponsoring businesses cement their links with communities that produce potential customers and employees.
“I have direct experience of the benefits these challenges bring to the staff who engage in them. Our companies in Business in the Community constantly report how their staff bring new energy and enthusiasm back to the workplace and a real pride in the role their businesses can play in the community.”
Rooney quotes another example of Business in the Community’s Pro-help scheme, where professional services firms pledge 20 to 30 hours of their time pro-bono into a sort of ‘knowledge and experience bank’. Business in the Community then links the pledged services to specific needs identified in local communities.
Public relations company Smarts, for example, has designed a website for the Community Foundation Northern Ireland. “PR companies have that expertise, the community organisation needs it. It’s a perfect swap, knowledge and expertise is exchanged for a staff learning experience and pride in community involvement.”
The Time to Read scheme brings staff from large organisations, such as banks, corporates and professional firms, into schools to improve children’s reading. For SMEs, Business in the Community is now also delivering toolkits and advice so they can carry out similar work.
But BITC is not just about boosting community confidence and capability. Paul Rooney points to wider involvement in areas like environmental benchmarking; 139 organisations from 15 different sectors have benefited in this year alone: “It’s a robust process but it is enabling companies to ensure their community responsibilities are reflected in an environmental conscience in meeting standards that are required in a new, environmentally-savvy world.”
With over 2,500 unemployed graduates in Northern Ireland, BITC’s Graduate Acceleration Programme aims to provide some of them with work experience and Rooney highlights this as a pro-active response to the current economic climate.
“We in BITC have been responding to the recession and inspiring and challenging organisations to say: ‘Let’s look at you as part of a community and how you can help that community.’”
His main message is: “As an organisation you have an opportunity to become engaged in a manner that is profiled to your needs, your corporate responsibility and the contribution you want to make. Link community responsibility to your business strategy in a post-recession environment and you can give hope and commitment to the community and win staff engagement and loyalty as a bonus.”
Landscape 
This work ties in with well-founded theories about the desired direction of business after the worst recession in living memory.
Rooney quotes the economist TK Whittaker, who has said that “it is only if we are educated, skilled and enterprising enough to produce goods and services saleable with a high margin of gross profit that we can expect high and rising living standards.”
He continues: “The challenge for us in Northern Ireland – and indeed the island of Ireland and the rest of the UK – is to ensure that post-recession we have economic growth and ensure that our skills, our education and our communities, are strong enough to meet the challenges of the new landscape.”
In the broader view, he predicts that this new corporate world will see more competition, even dominance, from emerging economies such as China, which has had annualised double-digit percentage growth. That, in turn, puts the onus on the rest of the developed world to create new advantages; in particular through the knowledge economy.
Paul Rooney sees education and engagement as critical factors in improving Northern Ireland’s performance, and also looks at the millennial generation – those born between 1982 and 1994 – as having the opportunity to develop these skills and put them into practice. Within his own organisation, 35 per cent of the workforce below manager level is now of that age and these employees are particularly keen to volunteer outside the workplace.
“In my opinion, the enlightened employer of the future will consult and work with not only his community within the workplace but also the community externally because we need to ensure as a society we are producing the talents, skills and the needs that will actually enable us as a community to grow.”
Engagement involves both communicating and working internally, with employees, and also externally with the broader community. When staff are engaged, they tend to show more loyalty and commitment, and go the extra mile for customers.
“Productivity increases when employees are engaged; there’s a positive business benefit to the bottom line profit in terms of wealth creation. If wealth is created, jobs are safer, employment grows, promotions happen and there’s an opportunity to actually enhance the community because if you’re wealthier, you can do more.”
However, the opposite is low productivity and the resulting consequences for price and profit. Some of PwC’s global research shows that employee performance in many corporations is declining. The number of employees showing discretionary effort i.e. using their initiative, has decreased by 63 per cent since 2005.
Better engagement can therefore help to reverse this trend: “Enlightened employers who have good relations with their work force have very high levels of discretionary effort.”
It can also help people to take a greater brand pride in their company.
“If staff experience brand pride, it will actually reinforce the brand strength and that’s through, once again, engagement. Our research also tells us that the most committed employees actually perform 20 per cent better and are 87 per cent less likely to leave an organisation.”
The new gold
It was put to Rooney that corporate responsibility is perhaps seen as less important during a recession but instead he sees an opposite trend.
“Believe it or not, we are experiencing that the reverse is the case. Volunteering has actually increased in the recession,” he points out. “From a Business in the Community perspective, that’s interesting because people have resource and one of the great reflections of the recession is that many organisations want to help even more those who are less advantaged, through their volunteering.”
Resource, in this context, means both motivated people and their available time.
“I’ve said on a number of occasions: ‘Our time is the new gold.’ And where you can give time and quality time to the broader community who are less advantaged than certain organisations, then that’s real value to them.”
Money was rarely mentioned throughout the interview and, indeed, BITC as an organisation insists that no money changes hands during these projects. They involve a free investment, where the community gets what it wants and the business also has a learning experience: a win-win.
This approach is qualitative but also quantifiable in a sense as staff feel good about themselves and bring back skills which they previously did not have, thus enhancing the company’s brand.
Community
Corporate social responsibility is the normal term used for these activities but, for Rooney, the term ‘corporate community responsibility’ seems more appropriate. The word ‘social’ can imply a form of charitable giving whereas he thinks people should not be afraid to emphasise the benefits to both communities and businesses.
“Corporate responsibility linked to business strategy for organisations, whether they are in the public or private sector is going to be critical for success given the engagement of the employees and externally to the environment and the community from which they get their stakeholders.”
A survey of BITC members during February identified three major challenges in this field. Firstly, companies must demonstrate that they live up to their values. Secondly, attracting and retaining a skilled workforce is a prerequisite for future success. Thirdly, environment issues will be “absolutely critical” for businesses in future.
Sixty-five per cent of members expected their investment in corporate responsibility to grow over the next 12 months.
“That requires commitment but it requires commitment from the top of the organisation right through. It has to link the board room to the factory floor,” he remarks.
“We all have a responsibility to our communities to give quality leadership, to give good communication and to commit to giving something back. And that’s at an individual level and that’s at an organisational level.”
Personal
Asked why this matters to him personally, he draws on an anecdote of a child discovered in a previous Business in the Community programme and the daughter of a single parent mother with acute drug and alcohol problems.
The 10-year old girl – let’s call her Mary – was invited to a friend’s house for a sleepover. Four days later when she still hadn’t been collected, the friend’s mother had to call and remind Mary’s mother where her daughter was.
Yet Rooney says that, despite her situation, ‘Mary’ is “very bright” and active; involvement through corporate responsibility helped give her an “I can” rather than “I can’t” attitude. “In essence,” says Rooney, “Mary gained real hope for a better future. An opportunity to see that the world she was in didn’t have to be the world that defined her future. For me that’s what we in BITC do.”
