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The Conference Board Review® Article
Last Year in Vegas; This Year in New Orleans?
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, more companies are sending employees South to combine teambuilding and community service.
John Buchanan is a journalist, author, and screenwriter. He lives in Blairsville, Ga. His last article for the magazine was "Meetings: The Biggest Money Pit of Them All," in the Sept/Oct 2007 issue.
Even before Hurricane Katrina more or less wiped it off the map, Biloxi, Miss., was quite a ways down the list of desirable top-executive getaway sites. But that's where more than two hundred senior managers from Schneider Electric North America found themselves in January 2007, for the company's annual leadership forum. Along with the usual leadership-forum stuff, the executives found themselves bonding over outdoor activities: building houses for Habitat for Humanity and a playground for KaBOOM!, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that partners with corporate sponsors to create public play spaces.
Schneider CEO David Petratis personally spearheaded the initiative to do a day of community service as an innovative kind of teambuilding, but he says the results surprised even him. "I grossly underestimated the goodwill, the esprit d'corps, the positive feelings and shadow that it cast on our workforce," he says. "We gave to the community, but I got back in positive energy ten times what we invested."
The event was so successful that the $3.7 billion Illinois-based company — the North American operating division of the Paris-based electrical-supply giant — returned to the Gulf Coast last January for this year's leadership conference — and at attendees' request, added an optional second day of service.
In undertaking such a high-minded mission, Petratis is not alone — and neither are Schneider's managers. CEOs are still pairing sales meetings, leadership conferences, training seminars, and other off-site events with teambuilding activities aimed at developing camaraderie, but instead of traditional golf tournaments and rock climbing, executives are finding themselves building houses for the underprivileged, restoring public parks, or raising money to renovate local schools. And instead of the usual winter retreats and resorts, teams of managers are spending days in New Orleans and elsewhere along the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast.
At a national sales meeting in New Orleans last year, Whirlpool, led by chairman and CEO Jeff Fettig, used a day of work for Habitat for Humanity to bridge a cultural gap between its legacy sales force and that of Maytag, which had been acquired by Whirlpool a year earlier. Konica Minolta, with the blessing of CEO Jun Haraguchi, "adopted" a New Orleans school as part of a national dealer meeting. Jeffrey Swartz, CEO of shoe and apparel company Timberland, rallied several hundred employees, as part of a sales meeting, to build homes for Habitat, landscape a school, and renovate a nonprofit restaurant that trains underprivileged youth for hospitality careers.
Such activities inevitably generate feel-good chatter and garner the kind of upbeat headlines that make corporate watchdogs smile. But they also raise important questions that often go unaddressed in the rush of enthusiasm over such well-intentioned activism. For example, is such use of corporate resources an appropriate role for the private sector? Or is it more an expression of a pervasive twenty-first-century sense of political correctness? What is the practical bottom-line business value of such activity? And can that value be measured?
Getting answers to such questions is not easy, because cheerleading for the cause clearly outweighs any public expression of skepticism. Who wants to come across as an insensitive Scrooge? Corporate social responsibility — a topic of robust and mostly one-sided debate for more than a decade — has evolved to the point where some preach that corporations should take on responsibilities once reserved for governments and nonprofit organizations. But CSR is not without controversy.
One of the few observers eager to rise to the challenge of speaking for shareholders is Betsy Atkins, CEO of venture-capital firm Baja Corp., an early-stage investor in Yahoo! and eBay. "I believe that Habitat for Humanity or other very noble charitable organizations are good causes, but they are for private charitable work," says Atkins, who sits on several boards of public companies and was a co-founder of $5.4 billion Ascend Communications. "They are not an appropriate use of corporate funds. Without a specific metric to tie back to the business performance of the company, such activity is not appropriate. I think it is mostly a feel-good exercise, and a misappropriation of corporate resources."
Atkins makes no apology for her fierce advocacy of shareholder interests. Moreover, she stresses her belief that she speaks for many CEOs who are afraid to speak for themselves because of the hyper-conscious social climate in which public companies operate today. To champions of community service as teambuilding exercise, however, Atkins represents a view that fails to grasp the changing role of business in society.
Comments? Write a letter to the editor.
Return to the March/April 2008 The Conference Board Review® issue.
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