Can social impact become the best catalyst for employee engagement?
In 2014, we’ve launched eSolidar, a giving marketplace that enables charities to diversify their fundraising base & reach new audiences through online charity shops, donations and special charity auctions with celebrities & brands. After reaching 50K registered users, 800 charities and work with several brands, eSolidar is now getting businesses involved.
We believe businesses play a key role on changing the world by embracing the power of social innovation. It can make an huge difference, not only on their branding and reputation, but more important, in their employees and culture.
eSolidar for businesses is an impact-driven employee engagement platform that allows companies to better understand and empower their employees, while measuring and amplifying social impact, by mixing the power of analytics, volunteering and charitable giving.
In a nutshell, eSolidar allows businesses to learn and understand employees’ motivations, preferred causes & passions; measure their satisfaction & engagement index; align CSR strategies & initiatives towards their preferences and benchmarkagainst other businesses in the industry.
Why are we becoming the intersection between HR and CSR?
Worldwide, according to Gallup, only 13% of employees are engaged with the companies they work for, and 17.2% are actively disengaged/toxic. A toxic worker costs about $12,000 per year in low productivity, and disengagement leads to higher turnover (a mid level replacement costs 150% of an annual salary). According to Compensation Force, the average employees annual turnover, in all industries, is 16.7%.
As a result, companies with low employee engagement have higher cost of capital and the main causes of disengagement are lack of employee recognition, rewards, personal development and misalignment between companies’ values and employees’ passions.
Looking at the market and how it impacts all the industry, currently is spent over $450B in the US with disengaged employees. In the UK it costs £340B every year.
But, at the same time, we found that 78% of millennials say that CSR directly influences whether they would work at an organisation, 90% say they want to use their skills for good, and 75% of employees want to be involved in their company’s giving and volunteering programmes.
Also, employees most committed to their organisations put in 57% more effort on the job and are 87% less likely to resign than employees who consider themselves disengaged. 89% of executives found a positive correlation between their volunteer/giving program and employee engagement and companies that report greater employee engagement generate up to 2.5x more revenue than those with low engagement.
According to IO Sustainability, traditional corporate philanthropy programs alone can increase employee engagement by almost 8%, increase productivity by 13% and reduce turnover by up to 50%. Those numbers can soar with a seamless, beautifully designed, powerful and easy-to-use strategic philanthropy software.
For example, considering a very conservative scenario of just 5% increase in productivity and 15% turnover reduction due to eSolidar, it can save $1.4M+ per year in a company with ~1000 employees.
We believe many companies are nowadays concerned about values such as integrity and develop ethical codes to foster responsible behaviour of their employees. We feel we can help them meet the triple P bottom line expressing the expectations of stakeholders with respect to the company’s contribution to profit, planet and people.
Sounds like an obvious thing to do, right? Not so fast. Here’s where we’ve been facing our biggest challenge. Most companies still misunderstanding the power of social impact within their organisations and usually think that’s a nice thing to have instead of a “must-have”. Social impact is not a cool CSR report by the end of each year. This has become part of our mission, to change companies mindset and how they do good.
We believe CSR strategies, when well implemented, can generate a massive impact on employee engagement and talent retention, as well as their branding, revenue and reputation.
PS: We’re currently fundraising our pre-Series A round. If you’re interested in knowing more or know who might be, feel free to contact me directly to marco@esolidar.com
