Cover Story

Generosity can bring everyone closer together. What can businesses gain from the act of giving?

Giving employees a sense of purpose can be conducive to employee retention, engagement, and wellbeing, and subsequently, productivity.

Christmas, the season of giving, is again around the corner. Collectively, we find ourselves scratching our head, pondering, “Where has the time gone?” Another year of COVID-19 has certainly warped our sense of time. It has also brought another year of cancelled plans and family visits, and in-person events invariably teetering on the edge of postponement or cancellation. Thankfully, technology is showing us that connection needs not be bound by geographical constraints.

But connection is just one of the things that the pandemic compelled us to rethink. In countries such as the US and UK, employees across the board, from low-wage to whitecollar workers, are resigning in droves. What is happening? The pandemic offered employees an opportunity to evaluate their companies’ integrity in upholding their corporate social responsibility, and many have since packed up, in search of workplaces and work cultures where their values and priorities are more aligned. Jolted back to reality, managers and business owners are asking, “Where is that greener pasture that our top talents have gone off to?”

Today, employees want their companies’ CSR initiatives to go beyond one-off activities that prioritise photo ops over actual capacity building for selected charities or NGOs. Particularly to Millennial and Gen Z employees, CSR is no longer a nice-tohave, but it needs to be a solid strategy to drive positive social and environmental impact, integrated into the business development strategy. And don’t cut corners with your CSR initiatives either – the tech-savvy employees of the modern workplace have all the means and data to hold you accountable.

Giving employees a sense of purpose can be conducive to employee retention, engagement, and wellbeing, and subsequently, productivity. By all means leverage your employees’ strong sense of purpose and encourage them to help identify the causes that your company can help address. Is it poverty, gender equality, or climate change? Conduct listening tours to find out the most urgent issues in the community that you operate in. Once you have grown these purpose-driven leaders, task them with the creation, management, and participation in community projects, as a way to promote generosity in your company’s culture. Think of your grant-making programmes as investing for positive impact. Amplify your corporate philanthropic giving by effectively channeling your corporate resources to the organisations that are generating maximum sustained impact

with minimum resources. In addition to establishing impactdriven grant-making strategies for your foundation, corporate philanthropy also exists in the form of skills-based volunteering, which helps train your employees into compassionate leaders while leveraging their skills and expertise to build organisational capacity for charities and NGOs.

As a company adopting an impact-driven business model, you can benefit from talent retention and attraction, higher productivity from employees and potentially better business outcomes, higher customer loyalty, and partnership opportunities with other companies that share the vision of redefining CSR.

Here’s a sobering thought: COVID is far from behind us, and the climate crisis is catching up with us. In the midst of all this, structural inequalities are exposed and further exacerbated. Before joining the chant of “We are all in this together to build back better”, align your purpose within your company first. As some of the stakeholders of your business, are your employees treated with compassion and generosity too? Start by building solidarity from within, and witness the culture of giving expanding organically outwards.

Read our feature stories this month and learn how your company and employees can both benefit from generosity in corporate culture, and likewise, how your company and the charitable organizations of your choice can reap mutual benefits from a human-centric philanthropic approach.

We wish you an impactful, fruitful, and rewarding season of giving!