Business Should use CSR to Support its Own Talent Pipeline

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Dollars Are Businesses’ Ace in the Hole to Repair their Broken Talent Pipelines.

KP Launches a New Campaign for Community Social Responsibility to Be Directed to After School Programs

Almost everyone agrees that developing talent is a good idea.  Few seem to be looking at some of the most visible and obvious examples of how to do it effectively, and with a long-term view of success. Without a comprehensive view of talent development, our sports industry couldn’t turn kids from the backstreets of Chicago (or Detroit, or Los Angeles, or, or, or…) to top earning international stars, who attract millions of fans. The work is painstaking, and requires a robust strategy and collaborations on the parts of schools, minor league teams, and coaches. 

The question is why we don’t seem to grasp how an integrated and collaborative strategy is the only way to develop intellectual talent. 

One reason for the disconnect is that many businesses seem more comfortable supporting the high school football team, awarding a science trophy, or hosting a career fair, than they are partnering with schools to make a more profound impact, think longer-term, and strategically collaborate. A possible reason for this might be myopic fear that deeper involvement eats into short-term profits.  For any business looking at talent development through this lens, this thinking overlooks two critical points.  First, this short-view misses the obvious fact that these geographically-close students may well be their future employees.  To the sports analogy, it’s like having young Michael Jordan playing streetball behind your gym, and upon seeing what he’s got, you tell him to take a hike to make room for your charity golf event awards function that evening, rather than inviting him to showcase his stuff in front of the gym’s other members (knowing he may well go out to the big leagues one day).  The awards ceremony may go off nicely, but one would feel the fool when realizing what true talent had slipped through their hands.

The second critical point missed is that as community stakeholders, taxpayers expect (some contractually, some emotionally and with wallet share) a business to invest back into the community from which they derive revenue.  In particular, corporations are tasked to give back through their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) efforts.  CSR can be defined as “a self-regulating business model that helps a company be socially accountable—to itself, its stakeholders, and the public.”  - Investopedia 

However, as the  MIT SLOAN Management Review comments, despite the laudable nature of the legislative intent behind CSR for corporations to take their community responsibility seriously, corporations often fall short in their efforts to give back to their stakeholders...instead, CSR is often relegated to the PR image campaigns so many organizations feel best promotes their brand. These efforts not only fall short of accomplishing CSR’s full potential, but are increasingly viewed as a form of “green-washing,” when applied superficially and without strategic depth or thought.   So often these programs may briefly help employees of the participating organizations feel part of their communities, but the benefit to the communities is neither sustainable nor effective in meeting the goals of addressing the long-term talent supply chain. 

...businesses are missing the reinvestment opportunity CSR dollars afford them – the ability to enrich their own talent supply chain.“

We’ve written before about how integration of CSR dollars into a strategic talent development supply chain is an overlooked low-hanging fruit business leaders often miss.  Beyond that, this integration can simultaneously win businesses philosophical and emotional points which CSR otherwise provides, but also provide a real impact on the needs of the businesses contributing these funds.  If untargeted, these dollars are spread thin and underutilized, hitting the brownie-points bar but missing metrics that show clear, sustainable (and even somewhat self-serving) positive change.  The bottom line is by engaging in the current near-sighted methods often seen, businesses are missing the reinvestment opportunity CSR dollars afford them – the ability to enrich their own talent supply chain. 

From Green Washing to Effective Talent Supply

Assuming businesses can deepen their appreciation for how to turn CSR dollars towards their own talent needs, the question becomes how to make that happen.  First, a community of business leaders has to acknowledge the limitations of the current educational structure in meeting talent supply needs for businesses all over the U.S.

The School’s Role in Talent Supply Chains

While we regularly applaud teachers and their desire to do good for their students, the structural setup and focus of the system’s ‘production goal’ means failure is almost inevitable as it currently stands.  The dismal statistics concerning how our educational system is so wasteful of talent is readily apparent to most who are somewhat familiar with US education.  

Every 26 seconds a student drops out of high school (that’s 7,000 per day, over 1.2 million per year). -U.S. Department of Education

Many more than that total are simply disengaged from school.  Even if they are the “lucky” ones who make it through to high school graduation, the number of students who then cannot find a job or want to go to college grows.  

Who Loses in this?  

All of us….

1. The Student
2. The Taxpayers
3. Businesses

The student who feels like they wasted the first 14-18 years of their life and now feels dejected (and soon rejected), and also the taxpayer who has just successfully thrown away the investment of educating students for 14 years at an average cost of $5,000 a year only to have the student seek public assistance. Pause to do the math...that means 14 years times $5K per year, for a total of almost $100,000, to deliver someone to the doorstep of social services (the next step in the taxpayer funding model).  That’s $100,000 times that pesky 1.2 million from a few sentences ago, in terms of the total potential loss to the taxpayer base. Conversely, that’s $100,000 times 1.2 million MORE that the business community is asked to collectively cough up with their tax payments.  This is not even touching on the fact that this last victim - businesses - have lost prospective talent.  When viewed through this fairly straightforward math, the loss is staggering.

Coming back to the school system, one thing is clear...schools cannot solve the problem alone. 

They are tethered to an outdated academic model that makes it virtually impossible for them to make a dent in this behemoth of an open drain on the public coffers. In the schools’ ardent focus on preparing students for four-year college tracks, they have limited tools and resources to prepare students for the modern workplace. In previous articles, Kinetic Potential has urged businesses to take a leadership role in partnering with schools to plug the holes in their talent supply chains.

The K-12 school system cannot just be where employers find consumers for their business products and services...the students should also be viewed as future employees. As college becomes more unaffordable even for the most engaged and driven students, those who are disengaged and will likely be left behind must be helped to gain the increasing numbers of middle-skill jobs that require some college or a registered apprenticeship program. As the Harvard Business School Report states 

Today, business leaders have a promising opportunity to work with educators, policymakers, and labor leaders to spark a revival of middle-skills jobs. To accomplish that, they must radically rethink their businesses’ roles in nurturing talent. This will also require employers to accept leadership over America’s system for educating aspiring workers and bringing the unemployed back into the workforce.

Kinetic Potenical’s Talent Supply Chain Model

Accordingly, Kinetic Potential is launching a campaign to push for all Chambers of Commerce to urge their members to get behind a CSR campaign that is highly focused on an area that can make a direct and long-lasting impact on the local and regional community. Specifically, after-school programs are largely run as custodial affairs — ways to occupy students before their parents can pick them up from school. We have firm evidence after-school time can be used to advance students' academic, social, and — perhaps most importantly — soft skills that employers repeatedly claim are missing from today’s graduates. Schools face two impediments, both of which are solvable with local political and business will.  First, schools have not been provided resources for this time.  Second, they need assistance in figuring out how to implement an effective program. Kinetic Potential has worked at this problem for over a decade across 35 states.  We’ve found at least three critical factors to success, particularly regarding the population that is most likely to be disengaged from or drop out of school. 

1. After-school programs need relevance — The KP Professional Maturity Model provides students virtual income to engage in real-world problem-solving. By gamifying the experience and having students’ problem-solving lead to advancement through various ranks (all the way to “professional”) they are rewarded at each step of achievement 
2. There must be an integration of a student’s accomplishments into the world of work. KP links the after-school experience to summer youth employment opportunities that operate in most cities and counties, allowing students to gain confidence in the development of their soft skills. 
3. KP measures everything students do and can follow their progress not just through the after-school experience, but also in their courses and extracurricular activities in KP Life, KP’s Technology and Experiential Learning Platform. 

Employers are critical stakeholders in such a partnership — they can fill at least three crucial roles:

1. Employers can play the role of a Talent Advisor, assisting students in making wise choices around the opportunities available, and specifically based on the employers’ direct labor market knowledge .
2. Representatives of the employers should serve as mentors to the students — helping them address social, emotional, and academic issues, as well as often filling the vital role of “caring adult” that research suggests could make a decisive difference in terms of whether they drop out or not. 
3. Employers have numerous resources who can serve as subject matter experts in the high school years as students’ projects become more intense and require engagement, consequently offering a perfect opportunity to connect school efforts to employment-related topics. 

If this economy is to recover from the pandemic, we need everyone to use the resources at their disposal to work together. 

KP will take the step forward to donate its software to any Chamber of Commerce or business willing to commit its CSR dollars to help construct effective employment centered after school programs.  

KP welcomes your comments and questions.