In their recent study, ‘Good Companies, Better Employees’, the Corporate Citizenship Company presents an excellent case for the role of community involvement and good corporate citizenship in promoting employee commitment and employer brand advocacy.

Over the last tow decades, the pace of change within companies has grown ever faster, and the global competitive pressures have become ever more acute. This study focuses on two trends that stand out from this period. First, companies repeatedly say ‘employees are our greatest asset’, shorthand for a series of initiatives around skills, motivation, involvement and empowerment. Second, they have tried to focus on the ‘corporate glue’ at a time when they are hollowing out and reengineering themselves, often through dramatic and disruptive reorganisations.

Within companies, those charged with managing both these aspects – whether Human Resources (HR) manager, Corporate Community Involvement (CCI) professionals or the many managers in line functions – are grappling with some apparently contradictory trends. When redundancies are announced, the share price goes up. Despite embracing wider social responsibilities, overt criticism of corporations is mounting in some quarters, while simple scepticism reigns in many others.

So a group of companies came together in this study to try to make sense of these trends and find the linkage between them. Many personnel managers see pride in the company and building a sense of common values between employee and employee as the ‘Holy Grail’ of human resource management. At the same time, many in corporate community involvement think their activities can have a t least as big an impact on employee attitudes and on their behaviour at work as on reputation among external audiences. This study examines both beliefs.

To download this study, click through to: www.corporate-citizenship.co.uk/employees