corporate social responsibility

Millennials are now the largest generation in the U.S. workforce, but they’re increasingly unhappy at their jobs. According to the 2019 Deloitte Global Millennial Survey, 49 percent of millennials would quit their current jobs in the next two years if they could.

One likely reason for this is a lack of purpose at work. In fact, the Deloitte study found that only 37 percent of millennials think business leaders “make a positive impact on the world.”

A company with strong core values and a clear mission aligns people of every generation and role to perform their best, feel like they’re making a difference and stick around for a longer tenure.

To champion happy, engaged employees and send retention rates soaring, HR leaders need to cultivate a sense of purpose among their employees. Here’s how they can do that.

Hire for Purpose

You can’t create a culture of purpose without purpose-driven individuals, and it’s difficult to instill a sense of purpose in those who don’t have one. Your best bet is to screen for purpose during the hiring process.

Enthusiastic, mission-driven candidates will help uphold a larger sense of purpose in your organization. They’ll also likely lead by example. A Harvard Business Review study found that positive behaviors and attitudes are contagious and are often passed from manager to employee. Finding mission-driven workers at every level can help you weave purpose into your organization.

To find purpose-driven employees, ask candidates about their values during an interview, add an application question about defining purpose and outline your company’s mission in job postings.

Incorporate Core Values into the Onboarding Process

A longer and more meaningful onboarding process is tied to higher rates of retention, according to Harvard Business Review. Be sure to introduce new hires to your organization’s core values and mission from day one.

Then show them these values in action with stories about current colleagues living the purpose. New hires will feel more connected to your company and more inclined to forge meaningful relationships with their co-workers. That way, they’ll feel compelled to embody these values — with like-minded colleagues — as part of their job.

Give Your Employees Purposeful Gifts

More companies are using gifts to show employee appreciation. But most corporate gifts are generic and forgettable. Branded mugs and t-shirts can’t capture a company’s values in a meaningful way.

Purposeful gifting is an excellent way to demonstrate your company’s commitment to social impact and community engagement. Mission-driven employees, especially millennials, care deeply about environmental and social causes.

A 2019 Gallup poll revealed that millennials’ concern about global warming is at a high point, and the Case Foundation’s “Millennial Impact Report” shows that millennials care about social issues rather than institutions and believe in the power of activism.

Gifts can simultaneously support those causes and show gratitude to your employees. These gifts could include a food basket filled with snacks from a company that employs survivors of abuse, a backpack created from recycled materials, or a tumbler and coffee set whose manufacturer offers jobs to individuals with disabilities.

Send these gifts during important milestones in your employees’ tenures. For instance, consider sending a food basket during onboarding or a backpack to accompany a prospective employee’s offer letter. Gifts can show gratitude in a concrete way that emails, letters and words may not be able to.

Leadership Should Embody Your Organization’s Core Values

Your organization’s leadership should be constantly reinforcing your core values, purpose and mission. As an HR leader, you can broadcast that vision to every employee at your company.

Identify company thought leaders — inside or outside of the C-suite — and highlight their perspectives on company value-driven goals and initiatives through internal newsletters and media. Purpose feels more genuine when it’s voiced by a real person at your company.

Offer Opportunities for Employee Development

Organizational purpose should nurture an individual sense of purpose. According to a 2016 Gallup poll, 87 percent of millennials consider training and development opportunities important when considering new jobs. When employees feel supported to pursue their own career and self-fulfillment goals, they’ll feel better aligned with their company.

Create room for employees to have purpose-based goals in addition to performance-only evaluations. Then, give them the resources they need to achieve those goals: one-on-one mentorship, leadership development programs, retreats, volunteering and enrichment activities such as cultural competency training. When their employer encourages and invests in them, employees want to stay and keep growing.

Purpose Drives Satisfaction and Retention

Today’s workers are increasingly looking beyond the old indicators of job satisfaction, such as job security and fixed salary.

Through hiring strategies, onboarding, gifting, leadership and employee development, HR leaders have a chance at every step of the employee timeline to show each employee how they can enact their personal and company values.

Purpose is a two-way street: you can demonstrate your company’s values in the same breath that you demonstrate how you value your employees. Values, after all, mean nothing if they’re not put into action.

Most employers want their employees to be healthier, and healthy eating is one way to achieve that. One company is taking this idea to the extreme and offering organizations the chance to grow fresh produce on site with their own farm.

Boston-based agriculture technology company Freight Farms builds IoT-connected, vertical farms — literally growing plants on the walls of shipping containers — using hydroponics, a growing method that utilizes 90 percent less water than traditional growing and a mineral nutrient solution in a water solvent without soil. The company sells its farms — called the Leafy Green Machines — to companies that would then be the ones responsible for staffing and upkeeping the farms.

In September, Freight Farms announced a new service called Grown that provides the labor to manage the farm, said Caroline Katsiroubas, director of marketing and one of the founding members of Freight Farms. Previously, some organizations didn’t have the staffing or facilities maintenance capacity to maintain a farm. With the Grown service, organizations pay an average pay $5,000 a month, for custom crop scheduling, maintenance, supply replenishment, 24/7 farm monitoring and all farming operations, such as seeding, transplanting and harvesting.

“We hope to see this huge barrier to entry for these organizations get resolved,” she said.

Indoor farming has come a long way in the past two years and become increasingly mainstream, she said. It’s becoming less of a challenge to convince people that it’s possible to grow food in an indoor shipping container.

The Leafy Green Machine operates by growing in a shipping container, 40′ x 8′ x 9.5′ per unit, in a climate-controlled environment, Katsiroubas said. Air temperature, carbon dioxide levels and watering are managed. LED lights stimulate day and night for the plants to echo a more natural environment. A central brain in the farm knows when to increase or decrease and turn off or on these environmental factors.

indoor farm benefits — LED lights stimulate day and night for the plants.

Freight Farms focuses on leafy greens such lettuce, heartier greens including kale and herbs because this produce uses the space more efficiently and growers get more food per square foot.

This isn’t unlike what many other indoor farms do, according to the “State of Indoor Farming, 2017” by Agrilyst, a management and analytics platform for indoor farms. Agrilyst tracks and analyzes farm data from 150 farmers who participated in this survey. This research found that 57 percent of growers focused on leafy greens, while only 16 percent grew tomatoes and 10 percent flowers.

Dassault Systemès SolidWorks Corp., a company that develops 3D editing software and is based in Waltham, Massachusetts, is using the vertical farm as an employee benefit, Katsiroubas said. “It helps them skip the produce aisle essentially when they’re going grocery shopping,” she added.

By growing its own fresh produce on campus Dassault Systemès was able to set up a community supported agriculture, or CSA, program with weekly deliveries that employees could sign up for, said Jim Wilkinson, former vice president of user experience architecture at Dassault Systemès and leader of the Boston Campus Employee Activities Committee. He recently retired after 22 years at the company.

A CSA is an arrangement in which consumers can subscribe to receive a certain amount of fresh produce from a farmer on a regular basis. For example, by signing up, an employee could receive a couple heads of lettuce, a couple heads of kale and a box of herbs every week.

About 50 employees, or 6 percent of the campus population, signed up for the deliveries, which cost the same or less than other local CSA programs, he said. Also, the produce doesn’t need to be washed, lasts longer in the refrigerator and does not need to be consumed right away.

“Plus, we were able to give input on what type of produce we would prefer which was a big bonus,” Wilkinson said. “Often CSAs deliver types of produce that you don’t even know what to do with.”

Dassault Systemès, whose software Freight Farms uses to design their farms, was interested in having their own farm for a few years, but, before the CSA program was introduced, that was not possible, he said. Now, the software company is participating in the first pilot for Grown.

Another way employers can distribute this company-grown produce is by offering a salad bar to employees, Katsiroubas said.

Freight Farms is starting out with its new service in the New England area with plans to grow in other geographies next year, according to Katsiroubas. Although she sees this as a benefit for interested employees, what often attracts leadership is how the hyper-local Leafy Green Machine contributes to corporate social responsibility, she added.