Human Capital Briefs

Is a lack of benchmarking capabilities hampering you from pursuing continuous improvement and innovation in your social impact measurement? With a corporate culture that values data and benchmarking, The Allstate Foundation was lacking a data-driven social impact measurement framework that aggregated metrics across its entire portfolio. The Impact Genome Project helped the organization update its metrics and devise an outcomes-based social impact measurement and reporting strategy.

Are you encouraging your communications team to showcase their effectiveness? Keeping a team motivated—to do their best work and to continuously improve—is a real leadership challenge. Kami Spangenberg, Vice President, Corporate Communications, RTI International, suggests giving your team the opportunity to highlight the business impact of their work to senior leaders through targeted annual reports.

Employee motivation is more a function of what you do rather than what you say. Your behavior and actions can have a cascading effect on the organization as you lead with your behaviors and show your priorities through your actions.

The stakes for getting D&I right are high, both for organizations and individuals. Unfortunately, many of our familiar D&I ‘best practices’ are inadequate amid ever-evolving demands and complicated contexts. To advance D&I outcomes, we need next practices.

How does an active wear brand become an activist icon? Deliberately or despite itself? Can product, purpose, profit, and politics mesh—or do they risk unraveling? And what’s the story behind the unconventional Patagonia beer? These questions and more will be answered in The Conference Board Marketing and Communications Center's April Monthly Chat.

How do you respond when someone publishes a story about you that isn’t true? Here’s how Mayo Clinic handled such a situation in August 2018 when CNN ran this: “Escape from the Mayo Clinic: Teen accuses world-famous hospital of ‘medical kidnapping.’”

Over the past few years, many of the world’s top companies have reduced or eliminated the option to work from home. Bank of America, IBM and Aetna all made news over their decision to change course.

Are you giving your grantees the right attention to help them succeed long term? To advance effective philanthropy, grantmakers must be as concerned with the entire grantee workforce as they are with grantee leadership. That means looking at the nonprofit through a workforce rather than a leadership lens and building relationships across the organization through surveys, site visits, and one-on-one conversations.

With labor markets tightening and labor costs rapidly rising in Central and Eastern Europe, the advantage of lower labor costs compared to the rest of the continent will further shrink over time and could mean that businesses will shift operations elsewhere.