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Guru Speak > Ms Suzanne Fallender, Intel
Guru Speak Interview: Employee Engagement for CSR
Ms Suzanne Fallender, Intel
Ms Suzanne Fallender is Intel’s Director of CSR Strategy & Communications in Intel’s global Corporate Responsibility Office. Suzanne works with business groups and senior management across the company to integrate corporate responsibility into strategic planning, policies, and communications, including managing the production of Intel’s annual corporate responsibility report.
In her role, Suzanne regularly engages with socially responsible investors, research firms, and NGOs to identify opportunities for continued performance improvements and development of global strategic initiatives. Suzanne has more than 15 years of experience in the fields of corporate responsibility and corporate governance. Previously, Suzanne was Vice President at Institutional Shareholder Services, where she was director of the company’s socially responsible investing group. Suzanne holds an M.B.A. from the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University and a B.A. from Trinity College in Hartford, CT. In this interview, she shares his views on Intel's employee engagement strategies, integration of CSR in core businesses, among others. Excerpts: "We Empower and Support our Employees to Follow their Passions"
Younomy: Intel's CSR projects are very diverse - from green energy to honeybee colonies. Do your employees submit some of these ideas? Suzanne Fallender: Intel has a long history in CSR – we first started reporting environmental health and safety data and goals in 1994, and released our first full CSR report in 2001. Since then we have been regularly publishing our CSR initiatives. We have also continued to work to integrate CSR into our culture, governance structures, and even our employee compensation. We have a number of programs designed to empower and support our employees to follow their passions. For example, our finance and supply chain organizations worked together to create a company-wide carbon calculator tool that allows project-level carbon reductions to be tracked effectively. The embedded approach enables employees to work on projects based on their passions and directly related to their skill sets. Younomy: Supposing an Intel employee finds himself/herself passionate about a local cause (like funding an orphanage or growing organic garden within work site). What happens next?
Suzanne Fallender: Through our Intel Involved program (our worldwide global volunteer initiative), we encourage employees to engage in their local communities, while Intel provides matching grants to the organizations that they support. We track detailed metrics on our employees’ participation in volunteer and service activities. In 2011, over 50% of our employees volunteered, generating over 1 million volunteer hours and $8 million in matching funds for over 5,000 local schools and non-profits in 45 countries. We also have formal programs for employees to submit project ideas. For example, through the Intel Involved Matching Seed Grants program, teams of employees can apply for funding from the Intel Foundation to get their creative volunteer initiatives off the ground. In 2011, grants were awarded to employees who worked to provide solar reading lights for students in rural Kenya, established a mini organic farm at a primary school in China, and many others. Our Sustainability in Action Grant Program provides funding and support for multidisciplinary employee teams that initiate and carry out environmentally-focused projects. Projects funded in 2011 included the installation of a rainwater harvesting project at a school in Israel, design of a zero-emissions heating and cooling control and supply system for a local community building in China, and recycling of plastic reels from our manufacturing process to create pencil boxes to donate to local schools in Arizona.
By allowing employees to take the initiative and apply for funding, we can ensure that projects are relevant and have a champion to promote the project. Project ideas are reviewed and approved by employee committees based on criteria related to the projected social and business impacts of the project, and if they have a focus on technology, that’s an added bonus. Younomy: You have operations in several countries and about 100,000 employees. How engaged are Intel employees? How do you define employee engagement?
Suzanne Fallender: Our approach to employee engagement is focused in three main areas: empowering employees to learn more about Intel’s CSR actions, to take action on specific projects or initiatives, and to share their ideas with others at Intel. Employee engagement varies by region and organization, and we do see a range of interest and activity on CSR issues among our employees with some very actively involved and some less so. In addition, some employees are more interested in certain CSR topics than in others – i.e. some may be engaged actively on environmental issues but not on education issues. In terms of metrics, we track the participation rate of employees in our Intel Involved program, as well as submissions and applications in our other employee engagement programs. In 2011, we also engaged True Impact and the Points of Light Institute to better assess the social and business impact of our Intel Involved program through quarterly surveys of our employees. Preliminary results have found that our volunteer programs provide employees with new job related skills and contribute to overall job satisfaction. In the first survey, 62% of respondents reported that their volunteerism was a “core component” of their overall job satisfaction, and 33% reported that volunteerism was a “positive influence” on their job satisfaction.
Younomy: Social product development - letting people (internal and external) define what is value and how to create it - goes hand in hand with sustainability, as the participation of social and environmental stakeholders brings demands for inclusiveness and sustainability while designing a product. Are there instances of Intel making its value creation process open for participation of external stakeholders?
Suzanne Fallender: Energy efficiency of products has become increasingly important in our industry and we engage external groups to identify collaboration opportunities. Through our Intel Energy and Sustainability Lab, we are working with Friends of the Supergrid, a group of companies focused on creating the European Electrical Supergrid. The Lab is also a key participant in the Sustainable Electrical Energy Systems research consortium at the University College Dublin and the ICT for Sustainable and Optimised Building Operation, a strategic research cluster for smart and energy-efficient buildings funded by Science Foundation Ireland. Intel has also been working with the Pecan Street Inc. consortium since late 2008, a first-of-its kind collaboration to bring together utilities, researchers, standards organizations and private sector companies to collaborate on testing, evaluation and endorsement of consumer smart grid architectures, interoperability and points of interface. In the area of improving education, engaging multiple stakeholders is absolutely critical to the success of our different initiatives. One such collaborative project is: Assess Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S), collaboration with Cisco and Microsoft. Headquartered at the University of Melbourne, the ATC21S group – which is made up of 60 top thinkers in academia, government, and industry – is developing new approaches to help transform the teaching, learning, and assessment of skills needed by students to succeed as citizens and workers in the 21st century.
Younomy: Large corporates like Intel are expected to create value for multiple stakeholders - for local community, environment, government, and not just for customers. How equipped is Intel as an organization to respond to the changing roles of corporate?
Suzanne Fallender: For many years, Intel has proactively engaged with a range of stakeholders and maintains processes to gather input and make sure that we are generating value through our actions. We have developed a number of tools and processes that provide stakeholders with the opportunity to share ongoing feedback on our performance and strategy, including community advisory panels and community perception surveys, through outreach trips to meet with investors on CSR topics, and through social media channels. We report in detail about our processes and methods for engagement and how that engagement has informed the development of new policies and actions in our annual CSR report. Younomy: How do you make use of the social media/technology for your CSR projects?
Suzanne Fallender: Social media is just one of the ways we engage with stakeholders and reach out to new audiences. We often share best practices, build excitement around initiatives, and learn from others. We have had the CSR@Intel blog in place for a number of years, which has proven to be a good way for us to gather feedback from our stakeholders – and we use our @IntelInvolved Twitter handle to reach an even broader audience.
In 2011, we launched a new series of external web sites called ExploreIntel.com, which provided real-time disclosure, monitoring and videos for the local community at our New Mexico, Dalian, China, and Costa Rica locations. Younomy: How do you make use of the power of social networks of employees for your CSR projects? Suzanne Fallender: We believe that our employees are our best ambassadors. The passion that they have for CSR issues and projects helps us achieve our corporate goals, and one of the ways they do that is by sharing their passion through their own social networks. Intel was one of the first companies to develop a robust training program and social media guidelines to encourage our employees to engage externally in social media on behalf of Intel. We encourage our employees to blog about their experiences or work on CSR projects through the CSR@Intel Blog, and we track metrics on readership, comments and amplification through other social media channels.
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