3 Tips in 3 Minutes: How to Incorporate Societal Causes into Everyday Work to Ignite Purpose in Your Organization

In my series Three Tips in Three Minutes for CSR Leaders this month, I have a special guest, Bea Boccalandro.

Bea is the founder and CEO of the global purpose advisory firm VeraWorks, and the author of Do Good at Work: How Simple Acts of Social Purpose Drive Success and Wellbeing.

Bea, please share a bit about what you do.

I help businesses ignite purpose within their enterprise, so everyone is doing something meaningful and contributing to others or societal causes as part of their workweek. This is what I wrote my book about.

It’s a phenomenal book—buy it, folks. Are you ready to share your Three Tips?

Tip #1

Direct your corporate social responsibility to have your business accomplish this inspirational vision: Don’t make any of the world’s problems any worse; choose one (at least) and make it better.  

For instance, if you manufacture surfboards, don’t pay your female sponsored-athletes less than your male sponsored-athletes. Don’t manufacture your surfboards in a way that adds microplastics to the environment. Don’t have a positive carbon footprint.

Tip #2

Choose an issue that’s up close to the business. Find a cause that links to its long-term success or positions your company to make a difference to the problem.

Tip #3

Involve your employees throughout the operation to use their specific skills to accomplish your chosen goals.

You can humanize your CSR significantly, leading to powerful results, including better health and morale for your employees.

Of course, listen to the entire interview to hear Bea’s excellent surfboard illustrations for these three tips.

And if you want to learn more about how Bea helps companies design and measure their CSR’s business and social impact, go to dogoodatwork.com.

Thanks to Bea for sharing. Let’s keep working together to improve work, ignite purpose, and create meaningful change through skills-based volunteering.

Bea Boccalandro is the author of Do Good at Work: How Simple Acts of Social Purpose Drive Success and Wellbeing (New York: Morgan James Publishing, 2021), which Wharton professor and New York Times bestselling author Adam Grant named a top 2021 book and Midwest Book Review recommends as “life changing, life enhancing.” Bea has been published in Harvard Business Review, The Boston Globe and other major publications; and has been featured on Forbes, FOX TV and other media outlets. As founder and president of the global purpose advisory firm, VeraWorks, Bea has two decades of experience helping businesses make customer interactions more human, products more inclusive, operations more environmentally sustainable, marketing more charitable or otherwise make work more meaningful. Her clients include Aetna, Bank of America, Disney, Eventbrite, FedEx, HP, John Hancock, IBM, Levi’s, PwC, TOMS Shoes, Toyota and Western Digital. Bea also has 15 years of experience teaching corporate social purpose and corporate social responsibility (CSR) at Georgetown University, Boston College and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She lives in San Clemente, California, with her husband. She is also a proud Rotarian, Venezuelan-born Latina and comically bad surfer. Learn more at www.BeaBoccalandro.com.