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Doing Good Never Looked So Great: Why Your Employer Brand Needs CSR

In recent years the prominence of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has grown to become a core activity of most businesses, but why is it so important for you as an HR professional? CSR initiatives helps build your company image within your community, but it also improves your employer brand and helps to attract and retain top young talent. Showcasing your CSR initiatives as part of your employer brand is more important now than ever, as a growing number of students, new grads and early-career professionals actively seek out a caring culture in potential employers.

In our 2019 TalentEgg Survey, an astounding 90% of post-secondary students ranked social responsibility as important to very important, for a company to be involved in, and that’s 15% more than last year! You may be thinking: “Egg-cellent, my company has several CSR initiatives.” But it’s not just about participating in CSR initiatives. It’s critical that you effectively communicate your involvement to your target demographic and help them connect the dots between your commitment to community and your commitment to employees.

TalentEgg’s blog, “The Incubator”, provides various career-related articles to help students, new grads and early-career professionals navigate their way from school to work. Our range of topics cover everything from the importance of volunteering to different companies’ involvement in their communities.

We also work with employers to write custom editorials and produce videos to showcase their CSR initiatives to help them reach our audience of young and passionate job seekers. In 2018, we worked with Mercedes-Benz Financial Services to create a custom video about their changing corporate culture with a focus on collaboration and community work. The video follows employees spending the afternoon at their local food bank. Cindy Voskuil, an HR Business Partner at Mercedes-Benz says: “It gives you a sense of pride to see that your work actually wants you to go out and take you away from work to spend your time giving back to your community.”

Providing these volunteer opportunities for employees is also a vital part of engaging and retaining your talent. Our survey found that 81% of high school students, 75% of post-secondary students and 64% of early career professionals volunteer. An additional 65% of total survey respondents currently don’t volunteer but want to, they just don’t have the time or don’t know where to start. Providing your employees with these volunteer opportunities as a part of their work shows your commitment to not only your company values, but also your employees’ values and their development. 37% of survey respondents state that having an employer whose values match theirs is an important factor in choosing a potential employer.

“I think it’s awesome to give employees volunteering days (that are also paid). You sometimes forget to volunteer because it’s usually unpaid work and some people can’t afford to do this, but the fact that companies specifically want their employees to volunteer is awesome.”
Mallory Thompson, Western University, 2019

Are you searching for opportunities to get your employees involved but aren’t sure how or where to start? TalentEgg has various partnerships to specifically guide and encourage students, new grads and early-career professionals to volunteer. Our sister company CharityVillage is Canada’s most popular career resource for the nonprofit sector. We work with CharityVillage to curate our volunteer opportunities directly from their site and tailor them for our audience. We also work with our sister company Bmeaningful, that features purposeful jobs in the social good sector and provides helpful resources to help people connect purpose with their paycheque.

This year we partnered with World Wildlife Fund to encourage students to become Living Planet Leaders @ Campus. The certification provides students with an opportunity to make a difference on campus and in their communities while teaching them teamwork and leadership skills.

We have also partnered with Students Offering Support to help students make a real impact while gaining real-world experience. Through this program students are able to gain leadership skills and vital volunteer experience by leading campus workshops and helping their peers excel in their studies.

It’s eggs-treamly clear that CSR is a must for employers to attract, engage, and retain top young talent. With our customized content and partnerships, we’ve made it easier than ever to connect with students, new grads and early career professionals all through one platform. Reach out to us to find the best way to promote your giving back initiatives and amplify your employer brand!

Partner Landing Page: WWF

An Amplification of HR Legal Trends from the Last Decade

February 6, 2020 / Stephanie Davis / 0 Comments

In our ever-changing workforce, it’s more important than ever for employers to stay on top of HR trends and what legal implications they may have on their organization, workplace culture and overall brand. We had the chance to speak with Greg McGinnis, Partner at Matthews Dinsdale & Clark LLP, about upcoming trends in employment law. What we discovered was that the trends from the latter half of the last decade are amplifying. Read on to see how.

Although there have been many societal shifts within the last few years, Greg comments that there really aren’t any new or radical changes in employment law, but rather previous trends are continuing. He does mention, however, that there’s a common theme or phenomenon happening as a result of previous trends, like the #MeToo movement, legalization of Cannabis and diversity in the workforce, which is fostering an increased demand for flexibility and zero tolerance for toxic workplaces.

Flexibility and Accommodation

“The main trend, if I can call it that, is that people are looking for flexibility in their work. They’re looking for flexibility in terms of hours of work, days of work, time off when they need it. The big trend is that employees want their work to fit in with their lives, and so employers are increasingly having to accommodate that kind of flexibility. That comes in all kinds of different forms. One form would be people who have young children, who want the time for child care or to attend events in their kids’ lives. Then you also have, especially in Canada, a large population of people who come from other places originally and they travel, so they want to have longer periods of time off to visit family or just travel. There’s an increasing trend towards flexibility at work, where it could be accommodated.”

“The idea that work is Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 and you better just show up – that concept has slowly been eroding for a long time and it’s continuing to erode. There are of course jobs where you need to be [at work] for certain time periods, but even then, people will want extended time off. We see this in every domain, from factory workers to office workers. People are demanding that their personal life and needs are reflected at work.”

Zero Tolerance for Toxic Workplaces

As a result of the same societal factors that gave rise to the #MeToo movement, Greg has found that the number of complaints being made that require the employer to carry out investigations has significantly increased. “I would say the #MeToo movement is a reflection of the same underlying phenomenon that people aren’t prepared to be treated poorly or suffer in silence. There’s next to no tolerance for toxic workplace behaviour. It is increasingly important for employers to ensure their workplace provides a positive, constructive atmosphere for people to work in and if they don’t do it, they will be facing a requirement to invest in workplace investigations…There’s a whole raft of time-consuming expensive consequences that can result from not dealing with these problems.”

Diversity

Diversity is an important value for many organizations. In Greg’s experience, diversity hiring has to be managed effectively by most employers to ensure all job seekers are given an equal opportunity to join a positive workplace, but that’s not always easy to achieve and maintain once your workforce becomes diverse. “Diversity has an impact on workplace culture because when you have new people or experiences, people come to work with different cultural expectations or behaviours that may require an adjustment on the part of the employer.”

Once you recruit a diverse workforce, you need to ensure your policies are, and the workplace is, welcoming, accommodating and, again, flexible. “You have a diverse workforce, you need a diverse workforce, then you need to find ways to reconcile new and different expectations where you need to get the work done. The challenge of diversity is that you don’t really know what’s next, you have to adapt to the people you are employing the best you can, and they need to adapt to you too.”

Cannabis: Biggest Issue That’s a Non-issue

Now that Cannabis has been legal in Canada for over a year, there have been minimal impacts on employment law, according to Greg. “Cannabis is the big nothing. It may have a long term impact, but the short term impact has been next to zero.”

“It’s not that all of a sudden people are bringing their drugs to work or consuming drugs in a different way. Most employers in anticipation of the legalization of cannabis took another look at their fitness for duty policies, and perhaps even their testing policies and gave some thought on how to approach that. Then legalization occurred and people braced themselves for the onslaught of stoners as if all of a sudden we were all going to turn into Cheech and Chong and it just didn’t happen!”

“Outside of safety-sensitive positions where someone could be seriously injured or killed or your actions could result in someone being seriously injured, or death or property damage, the issue of cannabis has not made any difference. And I think the reason for that is – cannabis is just one intoxicant. There’s a wide array of drugs out there, legal and illegal, and the legalization of cannabis has had a marginal impact on the way cannabis impairment, specifically, has been addressed when it’s been detected.”

Gig Economy

There were concerns about the ‘gig’ economy and the impact on the career prospects for millennial and Gen Z workers, but in regards to employment law, it’s really only made employers consider instituting more flexible work environments.

“My perspective on the gig economy is that it’s provided opportunities for people to work in small amounts on their schedule that competes with the regular employment pool. So people who want more flexibility can get it by becoming a gig worker. I think the gig economy has expanded opportunities for people. [Employers] have to recognize that their employees can go and do consulting or gig work as an alternative to regular employment. So it forces more flexibility onto employers as well.”

With the evolution and expansion of trends from the last few years, Greg notes that in the legal sphere, changes in the law are harder to predict. “The world of work is driven more by cultural change than by legal change. We’re not seeing a lot of radical legal changes now or anticipated in the future. The society is changing, so we have to respond to that.” It’s important that employers are staying on the cutting edge of emerging and continuing societal and workplace trends, especially when considering incoming talent will come into the workforce with new and sometimes challenging expectations for employers to meet.

For more TalentEgg Legal Briefs, be sure to subscribe to our monthly employer and career educator newsletter.

Coaching – New Paradigm for Effective Leadership

February 6, 2020 / Maria Vasserman / 0 Comments

Leadership is critical in today’s evolving business environment. Leadership affects the culture, people, and the organization’s overall ability to succeed. But the age-old question remains the same – what makes a good leader? We spoke with Susan Pahl, Founder & CEO Shift Coaching Inc., to get her perspective on leadership and the role coaching plays in leading a successful team.

Name: Susan Pahl

Occupation: Founder & CEO Shift Coaching Inc.

Susan Pahl is the CEO and Founder of Shift Coaching, a leadership development and corporate coaching company. Shift Coaching develops leaders, teams and organizations to adapt change and grow.

“To me, leadership is not a position, a title or a set of traits. It is the ability to get others to want to work together and even struggle to achieve a shared goal. The ultimate form of leadership is to enable each member of the group to bring their best self and best efforts to bear on the goal at hand,” says Susan.

Analyzing the Trends

Susan engaged in extensive research to understand the new trends in leadership development and get ahead of the curve. She was particularly struck by the data that showed the impact of coaching on productivity, culture and employee engagement in business across a variety of industries.

“According to a study by Bersin & Associates, now a part of Deloitte, leaders that coach are 130% more likely to realize stronger business results. In addition, organizations with a culture of coaching achieve 21% higher business results. These are astounding numbers. When your leaders use coaching as an integral tool of management, the business grows.”

“Research by Zenger Folkman found that “more than 60% of employees who report to managers who are not good coaches are thinking about quitting.” This is based on more than 500,000 360-degree assessments on 50,000 leaders. Coaching is a fundamental tool to not only bring out the best in people, but retain them too.”

Susan also identified what many modern leaders struggle with. She describes how “command and control leaders rely on their own skills and abilities to solve problems and be the experts. This new world requires multiple people and multiple brains to be able to navigate this fast-paced increasingly complex world we live in.” Instead of taking an authoritative approach, Susan suggests that leaders need to know how to create “a collaborative work environment where people can think for themselves, solve problems and be innovative.”

Finding the Niche

The reality today is this: “There is no playbook or training program to address the complexity that people are facing today,” Susan comments. Constant adaptation to change, competition for attracting and retaining top talent as well as employee development are just some of the ongoing tasks that managers need to think about.

“The role of HR is changing. How do we prepare people to work, lead and learn effectively in the complex constantly changing world? To start we need to support HR professionals and career educators to become coaches and equip them with the skills to support others.”

Identifying the gap between employees’ expectations and managers’ ability to meet them, Susan came up with the idea for Shift Coaching. “I wanted to provide a program that covered all the essential elements of coaching in the context of the business environment with practice, reflection and feedback that would fit in with a business person’s busy schedule,” says Susan. She adds that “every leader needs A coach and that every leader needs TO coach.” So really, Susan teaches others to learn by doing. Those who participate in the program not only learn how to coach others, but they also get coached themselves.

Coaching Leaders

So how does The Shift Corporate Coach Program work? It is built for business leaders and it stands apart from other coaching programs because it incorporates the business context, is efficient and is integrated into the leaders’ workday. Unlike other programs that only provide a generic overview of coaching or require a significant time investment, Shift Coaching equips participants with practice, reflection and feedback that fits within a business person’s busy schedule.

Participants learn core coaching concepts through an experiential hands-on process. As a result of completing the program, according to Susan, leaders can:

Generate improved productivity
Reduce conflict across the organization
Increase the response to managing and implementing change
Use industry-leading leadership tools to grow staff and develop people
Create a renewed vision and strength in their approach to developing the corporate culture
Create a greater focus on the art of relationship-building throughout the organization; with direct reports, peers, stakeholders and clients
Explore the benefits of using coaching conversations in everyday applications as well as in formal protocols

Shift Corporate Coach Program recently opened up for new grads in an effort to shape the leaders of tomorrow early on.

“Becoming a coach early in a new grad’s career will prepare them to have healthy approaches to the people issues and have the ability to coach others, preparing them for positions of leadership. We have heard so many of our [more mature] participants say that they wished they had these skills 20-30 years ago and how their careers may have been very different. So we said: “Why wait?” – let’s bring this to new grads and help them get coaching skills early on.”

Constantly Evolving

It’s evident: the change is here. The massive challenge of adapting and evolving together with the industry is something that every business manager (current or aspiring) needs to embrace.

“Robert Keagan calls it “Constructive Destabilization” in his book “An Everyone Culture”. He says that, if you can perform your role to a high level, you are actually no longer in the right job. As soon as something is working perfectly, it is time to blow it up and move up to the next level. He suggests running into useful trouble and using this trouble to learn and grow. This is the opposite of “business as usual”. Pain + Reflection = Progress.”

Susan comments that HR professionals will only be able to grow by introducing desirable and purposeful challenges in their work lives. Learning and development programs are a safe way of practicing to combat these difficulties.

“Ongoing development must be woven into the daily fabric of working life and people’s limitations will be seen as their growing edge. Organizations need to aggressively seek opportunities for their leaders to practice, experiment and learn in this new changing environment. They also need to change how they evaluate and develop leaders,” says Susan. Her passion for better leaders of tomorrow is evident in everything she does.

If you’re ready for the next step in your leadership development, explore what Shift Coaching has to offer. Do you know a soon to be or a recent grad that might benefit from the Shift Corporate Coach Program™️?

TalentEgg is proud to partner with Shift Coaching to offer young professionals an exceptional leadership development opportunity give-away valued at $5,000! Find out more here!

How Are You Helping to Build the Workplace Critical Skills Pipeline?

February 6, 2020 / Trevor Buttrum / 0 Comments

When describing what differentiates top talent amongst students and new graduate candidates, we often find ourselves referencing their ‘soft’ or workplace critical skills. Things like creativity, teamwork, critical thinking, problem solving, and leadership.

As employers, we seemingly all want these skills to be a part of the candidate profile for our new graduate programs, summer internships, or open positions on campus. And, if the expectation is that students come prepared with these skills when they arrive in the workplace, I wonder how can we as career educators and campus recruiters help students to identify, acquire, and nurture them before they land their first job?

For me, the approach is two-fold:

I think it starts with helping students to become fluent in the art of articulation, reflection, and offering up evidence.

Let’s work an example – communication skills. We know that having a student simply state they are a good communicator is not enough. Rather, it’s how they demonstrate they are a good communicator through examples or description that sets them apart.

Fellow campus recruiters, I am offering up a challenge to you here. Let’s commit to trying to better articulate our needs. Continuing with the ‘good communication skills’ example, what if we said something like this in our postings:

‘Persuasive business writing, active listening, comfort delivering critical or difficult messages, and strong presentation skills are essential for successful communication in our organization’.

The more specific or articulate we are, the more a student has got to work with and reflect on. They can start to assess whether they have demonstrated these skills and attributes in their studies or work to date, come up with evidence to support it, and if a gap exists, have a clearer goal to work towards. If Year 1 students knew what you were truly looking for in terms of workplace critical skills when they embarked on their program, think about where they might be by the time they graduate. Perhaps ‘top talent’ would be more plentiful?

While these notions are by no means new, it stands to reason that by providing students with ample opportunity to reflect on and to talk about their skills in meaningful ways (whether it is a part of their experiential learning, course work, co-op, or even workshops) the more comfortable and confident they will become in talking about their workplace critical skills as potential candidates.

The second piece is all about providing additional opportunities to develop and nurture workplace critical skills while in school. Case competitions, challenges, portfolios or workplace critical skills passports, skills badging, and experiential learning are all great ways to achieve this. Think about how you can get more involved in these types of initiatives. While yes, the time investment does need to be there to make it most effective, you will be doing wonders for your credibility, brand, and building up of the pipeline of the skills you’re ultimately wanting students to have in their toolkit.

Challenge yourself. In your next round of engaging students – how will you help them to get really good at articulating, reflecting, and evidencing their workplace critical skills? What opportunities will you provide to develop and nurture them? Happy skill building!

Trevor Buttrum is an award-winning career education and campus recruitment leader with 15+ years of experience in the space. He is currently the manager of a national program focused on building the talent pipeline for the next generation of the property and casualty insurance workforce.

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Today’s Talent, Tomorrow’s Leaders

Tag: HR (page 1 of 2)

Doing Good Never Looked So Great: Why Your Employer Brand Needs CSR

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