Benefits of a Sustainable Organization

Nikki: Hey, Gut + Science listeners. I am thrilled to have a Corporate Social Responsibility, ESG and Aspirational Business expert join Gut + Science to inspire us and equip us with the information and ideas we need to build a meaningful business around our mission and for our people. Introducing, my friend, Dora Lutz. Dora, take it away.

Dora: While I was participating in a podcast last month, the host dropped an absolute truth bomb. She said, “Sometimes I think that our purpose hits us really early on in our lives. We just don't necessarily know how we can incorporate that into our career too.” Man, I felt that. But I actually think it goes even deeper than a lack of understanding or permission that we are not sure how to incorporate purpose into our careers. I think that a lot of us, myself included, were brought up in the world thinking that finding a sense of purpose in our work was, at best, unrealistic and, at worst, self-indulgent.

It made me think about the commercials that were playing on the super bowl in the year that I graduated. You might remember them. They were monster.com commercials where they had these cute little seven and eight-year-olds dressed up in hard hats or business suits. And they were sharing their dream that someday they would grow up to work in middle management. And these ads were really tongue in cheek because, on the one hand, they were reminding all of us what we had given up, the dreams that we had given up to go work in corporate America. And they were intending to offer us hope to remind us of what we had hoped for or aspired to as young children. Although I'm not sure it worked since at the end of the day, they were really just offering us the opportunity to apply at companies like Enron.

And I would say that maybe over the two decades that followed business leaders evolved a little bit to realize that people didn't want to dream about working in middle management anymore. We had all of these darn millennials who were saying that they wanted to have a job that allowed them to make a difference in the world and make a living wage. But even that was met with a bit of skepticism. I can remember, even as recently, as five years ago, talking to CEOs who would say, “Yeah, yeah, Dora. I know that that's what people say millennials want, but I'm just not convinced.” And I’ll bet that there's at least one leader on this call who might have thought that they could just wait it out.

But here we are now in 2022, millennials are not the generation we're talking about anymore. Now we're talking about gen Z, who we know are demanding meaningful work and fair pay. And not just that coming out of the pandemic and the great resignation, we know that people and employees of all generations are reevaluating what they want from the companies they work for and buy from. And they're willing to take action. Employees want to feel more valued by the leaders that they work for, or they will leave. Customers want values alignment from the companies that they support, or they will switch brands. And communities want to receive value from the businesses that they allow into their neighborhoods, or they will fight back.

So most leaders at this point really do understand that employee preferences are driving a different tenor and a different need to create social impact. But I would bet that most of them are not aware of the depth by which people are saying that this is important to them.

So I wanna talk today just about what employees are saying matters to them. A recent report came out and this statistic is stunning to me, 96% of employees say that they expect their organization to be pursuing a sustainability agenda. 96% of employees expect their organization to pursue a sustainability agenda. When we're talking about sustainability, we're not just talking about the environment. We're talking about all of the factors of the sustainable development goals, all the things that we need to do to be sustainable as a human race.

90% of employees say that they would take a pay cut in order to have a meaningful job. That's pretty stunning in its own, right? If we're saying 90% of our employees because we know that 90% of our employee base is not just these darn millennials or these gen Zs that wanna change the world. 90% of our employees would take a cut. And that pay cut that they're willing to take is as high as 23% of their lifetime earnings. Almost a quarter of their lifetime earnings are less important to them than having the opportunity for meaningful work. Absolutely stunning.

Now I am not suggesting that you should just start talking about purpose and begin reducing your pay. But I am suggesting that extending your company's mission and vision statement into the broader conversation about your impact on the world, whether it's a global goal or a local need, has an incredible opportunity to engage and retain your employees.

Let me give you an example from a financial services company that I'm paying attention to. Now, this is not only a bank, but this is a bank located in South Dakota. And it's an organization called Meta Financial. And what I love about Meta Financial is that they have taken a traditional banking institution and they have shifted their mission statement, not only into something that clearly creates opportunity for everybody in their organization to innovate toward, but they have also aligned it with the sustainable development goals. Their mission statement is financial inclusion for all. The work that they are trying to do is to reduce poverty, provide opportunities for decent work and economic growth, and reduce inequality.

Now. I don't know about you, but personally, I find a statement, “financial inclusion for all,” to be way more compelling than JP Morgan's, which is to be the best financial services company in the world, whatever that means or Wells Fargo's mission statement to satisfy their customers' financial needs and help them succeed financially, where they have clearly just left out the second half of that sentence, which says or indicates that they should do that using whatever dubious means, seem appropriate to their team. And the beauty of this work that Meta Financial has created in building a mission and value statement that connects to its larger social purpose is that it leaves so much room for creative thinking and innovation. You can look at what they're doing and just over the last few years, Meta Financial has figured out how to go deeper on their culture to increase diversity and equity through their hiring and promotion practices. They've increased their community engagement. They're using their federally mandated community reinvestment act dollars to do this work that supports their vision statement and to engage their employees by creating volunteering, opportunities. They have built a three-tiered line of defense program to ensure that everybody from the front lines to the boardroom is clear on what they need to be doing from an ethical decision-making standpoint and that they bring it to life.

They've created new products and new services that focus on meeting the needs of individuals in existing underbanked communities. They're finding the people who have been disenfranchised from the system and figuring out how to solve their needs. And they've increased funding sources for environmental opportunities. Environmentally focused businesses. So they figured out what they've done, they found their model and they figured out how to support other industries with a financial bend. And the impact of their work shows. They have a 23% participation rate in their employee resource groups. They have an overall employee engagement score that's five points higher than existing benchmarks. And their diversity efforts are showing in the front line, although, in the interest of transparency, they've still got some work to do when it comes to senior leadership.

And the beauty of all of this is that not only are these efforts showing within the work being done inside the organization, but it's curing favor with investors. In fact, Meta Financial’s returns outperformed JP Morgan and Wells Fargo by 20% over a two year time period. And that's the beauty of social impact and finding ways for people to engage deeply with the mission and the impact of our organization.

It's not unrealistic and it's not self-indulgent in fact, when we do it right, we can make a difference for everybody in our ecosystem and we can drive profit.

Oh, and one more thing you can probably tell by listening to these podcasts, that I am really passionate about the opportunity for business to make the world a better place. But for this work to really take root, we need everybody in our organization to understand how this work drives the bottom line, to think about ways that they can create impact regardless of their role within the organization, and to feel inspired and empowered, to think about their purpose and the way that they can make the world a better place.

To learn more about how I can get your team up to speed on the power of social impact or ESG visit giving-spring.com. I look forward to seeing you live.

Nikki: We just left the world a little bit better. Now, go do something with that.