Dances with Bees

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When you think of Citigroup, what’s the first thing that pops into your mind? Credit cards? Citigroup’s ranking on the Fortune 500 list? Waggle dances?

If it’s the last one, you’re right on target.

Waggle dancing is a form of “bee dance” recently performed by more than 150 Citigroup employees and guests at a Citigroup Commercial Business Group event in Jamaica. Don’t worry — the “powers that bee” at Citigroup haven’t flipped their wings, or lost their corporate focus. In fact, quite the opposite. Citigroup is among the hundreds of companies that have made corporate social responsibility a top priority. In today’s world, they’ve decided, it’s vital for companies to give back to the community, and give a helping hand to those in need.

The social responsibility factor means that many companies have shifted their focus away from the adventure-centric team-building activities of just a few years ago, such as ropes courses. Instead, team-building activities are being designed with the community in mind. In this new type of corporate team building, community service-focused activities benefit the community, employee morale and loyalty, and the company itself. Accordingly, planners across the country are brushing up on their altruism.

What does all this have to do with waggle dancing? This unusual activity was simply one part of the Citigroup team-building activity that benefited the Jamaican bee farmers of the All Island Bee Farmers Association (AIBFA), which lost 2,500 beehives — a significant source of income — due to Hurricane Katrina.

After the Citigroup employees learned about the AIBFA’s plight, the employees performed a fun scavenger hunt to find the beehive components and constructed the hives, using waggle dancing instead of verbal communication, as do bees. The 30 beehives constructed as a result of this event were sent to AIBFA members.

“While 2005 was a successful business year for Citi,” says Barbara Blumhof, manager of events for the Commercial Business Group, “it was also a year of unprecedented global humanitarian effort by Citigroup and its employees. It is in this spirit of commitment to the global community that we chose an activity that allowed us to give back, rather than take back from our visit to the island.”

The event was designed by Impact 4 Good, an organization that works with socially responsible companies by providing team-building activities that help achieve business objectives while giving back to the community.

A Cultural Shift

There has been a distinct shift toward social responsibility in today’s corporate culture, according to a recent survey on corporate community involvement by Deloitte & Touche USA LLP. This study showed that 92 percent of Americans think it is important for companies to make charitable contributions, and/or donate products and/or services to nonprofit organizations in the community, while 87 percent of Americans think that it is important for companies to offer their employees volunteering opportunities.

This news is no surprise to Alan Ranzer, the executive director of Impact 4 Good. For the last eight of its 10 years in business, Impact 4 Good has facilitated such team-building events at the request of its corporate clients.

The civic-minded organization continues to develop new activities that allow corporate employees to participate in team-building exercises to benefit needy communities, as well. For example, Impact 4 Good united with the nonprofit Solar Cookers International on a project in which corporate employees build and send solar cookers to developing areas in Africa. Through its partnership with the nonprofit Los Niños, corporate employees build beehives for a women’s cooperative in the U.S.-Mexico border community of Mexicali. Through bee-farming, the women in the cooperative produce and sell lotions, beeswax candles and healing salves while working toward financial sustainability.

Impact 4 Good’s latest collaboration is with an affiliate of Habitat for Humanity, St. Tammany West, near New Orleans. Since Impact 4 Good works with businesses that can only spare employees for a short time, it has designed shorter activities to accommodate such schedules. Employees involved in this type of activity spend their time building mailboxes or birdhouses to donate to the local Habitat for Humanity affiliate, which sends them on to the beneficiaries, says Ranzer.

“In all of our activities, what we’re trying to do is to create a community service possibility for a company that might not have the time to go to the community… . This allows people to give back in their own way. We bring the customer service activity to the conference room,” says Ranzer.

“There is a natural connection between volunteering and team building,” says Andy Nelson, the executive director of Hands On Portland, an organization that connects volunteers with opportunities to serve the Portland community. Hands On Portland’s clients have included Nike, Adidas and Comcast.

The Portland, Ore., group is part of a larger organization, Hands On Network, which is a growing network of more than 500,000 volunteers and approximately 50,000 volunteer projects a year. Its projects have ranged from building wheelchair ramps in San Francisco to teaching reading in Atlanta. Hands On Network has partnered with The Home Depot and Hands On Network’s Corporate Service Council, an alliance of 47 Fortune 500 companies and civic organizations that are “committed to mobilizing the corporate workforce to be a community change force throughout North America,” according to Hands On Network.

While employees are looking to their employers for leadership, Nelson says, employers are often looking to volunteering events as a way to build employee loyalty and morale in a competitive hiring market.

“Some of the specialized industries will tell you that they’re looking for the difference-maker when it comes to attracting and retaining qualified employees, and often employees will look to an organization and its culture and make that decision about if they want to work there or not. And, in that kind of an environment, businesses that provide opportunities for the employees to get involved … are just ahead of the curve, making themselves really attractive to employees,” says Nelson.

“In terms of employee morale and corporate loyalty [studies show that] employees that are offered volunteer opportunities with their company are very proud of working for their company. And they’re more likely to stick around longer, because they know their company is caring [and] gives something back to the community,” says Ranzer.

Another benefit of company-wide volunteer programs is that the company’s employees are able to see their leaders doing more than just talking the talk. They see the leaders out there getting their hands dirty — literally, says Nelson. “And what’s great about a volunteer project is that everyone’s equal, everyone’s doing the same job. A vice president [of the company] is working alongside a line worker, for example. And the vice president enjoys that, as does the line worker. That is really valuable.”

While corporations have traditionally aided some causes as financial donors, says Nelson, “I think there’s a sense that it’s not enough just to give money, but that organizations [that] are also able to [offer volunteers] are showing a fuller support of their community.”

Making it Happen

Many companies, including Impact 4 Good, and Leapfrog Innovations, a corporate team building and leadership development firm, work directly or indirectly with a corporation on these events.

Leapfrog Innovations has worked for the past nine years on a global leadership program for the pharmaceutical company Wyeth. For the past four years, this program was designed in partnership with Isles, a New Jersey nonprofit organization whose focus is fostering more self-reliant families in sustainable communities in Trenton, and YouthBuild, a segment of AmeriCorps designed to help kids ages 16 to 24 learn life skills and construction skills while earning their GEDs. The students from YouthBuild are partnered with Wyeth’s global leaders to tackle the activities and share in the learning experience.

Dick Eaton, Leapfrog’s founder and CEO (that’s Chief Energizing Officer in Leapfrog-speak), says that collaboration with a nonprofit is key to the program’s success.
“You need someone on-site who knows what is needed by the community, knows the community members very well, and can have a project that they know will be of very significant value,” says Eaton.

A recent Leapfrog-Wyeth project took place in a part of Trenton near a daycare center that was “downtrodden,” says Eaton. The goal? Creating a safe, clean neighborhood playground for the daycare children, school-aged children and the neighborhood in general. Once the project was chosen, Leapfrog designed a “marketplace simulation” — in this case, a behavioral experience designed to teach the participants teamwork and leadership skills.

“We map out this five-acre park, and it becomes basically this huge gameboard … . We do problem-solving challenges that are very complex … . This community service project with Wyeth is just like that… . The evening before, we take these four project teams they’ve designed, and we challenge them with how they’re going to finish off this work.”

A critical component, says Eaton, is engaging the volunteers emotionally. “We have them learn about the community, learn about the good work that Isles is doing [and] meet several of the people that they’re going to be paired with.”

Overall, says Eaton, “this project yields great benefits for the community, while helping the Wyeth participants and YouthBuild students learn about teaming and leadership.”

The Continuing Trend

This change in corporate culture, according to Eaton, can be attributed in part to today’s shaky, post-911, post-Katrina world, where more and more Americans are reaching out to help each other.

The dynamic trend toward corporate volunteerism will only continue and expand, says Nelson. “Companies are more and more tying employee involvement to giving, and often as well, they’re targeting their giving to specific causes or organizations that are of most interest to them. As competition increases more for fundraising dollars, companies are selecting certain causes — often tied to the corporate mission — so if they’ll reinforce that with volunteering, it’s really powerful.”

As a planner for your company’s employees or for your clients, you probably won’t have to lead a team in “Dances with Bees,” but you will want to be equipped to help corporate America realize its aspirations of strong corporate social responsibility.

These days, says Nelson, “the question isn’t going to be, ‘Are you involved with employee volunteerism?’ It’s going to be, ‘How are you involved with employee volunteerism?’”