
(1) Helping staff to have more purpose in their life can be more valuable than free gym membership
People get used to nice perks and benefits, however, the insight behind the Spice Program is that humans rarely tire of having more purpose in their lives. So instead of piling on yet more benefits, why not help employees to contribute their skills or expertise to a wider social good?(2) Allow staff to decide which projects to support
Traditional corporate social responsibility usually sees management decide on a cause then throw money at it. Alternatively, they might allow staff to spend a certain number of work days each year raising money for the cause. This may help with PR but it’s less effective as a strategy for managing employee happiness decay. Why not allow people to choose the cause dear to their hearts and help them to advance it?(3) Pay people to take part
Client demands and workloads mean it’s all too easy for extra projects such as good causes to be put to one side when things get busy. One way round this is to pay people to work on social impact projects in their spare time. Participation in social impact projects should be completely voluntary, to avoid companies coming across as intrusive and controlling. In our company, roughly a third of staff take part in the Spice Program although it varies from month to month.(4) Establish rules
It’s worth setting guidelines for the sort of projects your business is prepared to support. This could include requiring projects to meet certain criteria such as employees learning a new skill and the project benefitting the business itself, as well as delivering a wider societal impact. A good example of a social impact project that ticks all three boxes would be designing a blueprint to kick-start mobile app development. The project allows staff to experiment with new software, which in turn introducing new competencies to the company and boosting its innovation credentials.So how do social impact programmes affect happiness decay?
One final top tip about using a social responsibility approach to manage happiness decay is to check that it’s working. Happiness decay is difficult to measure – probably the closest HR concept is staff engagement. Our anecdotal experience suggests that it does: in an employee engagement survey we carried out last year, over 40 per cent of staff cited the Spice Program as an initiative that helped them enjoy working at our company. What’s more, people who took part in the Spice Program scored higher levels of employee engagement than others, they trusted their colleagues more, had challenged themselves to learn new things and were more willing to recommend the company as a place to work. Participants also gained a sense of beneficence, of being able to have an impact on causes they value, including giving back to the open source community. Sponsoring social responsibility activities will not automatically reduce happiness decay / improve employee engagement. It’s also not a substitute for workplace culture, the usual benefits or a fair rewards system. However, in our experience, social responsibility projects are a valuable alternative to simply piling on more benefits and they help companies like ours to be good corporate citizens. Just as importantly, they contribute to managing happiness decay via a sense of shared community values, through which great things can be achieved. Teemu Turunen is director of social responsibility at digital innovation consultancy Futurice Image: ShutterstockShare this story