How giving in the workplace durably improves inclusion and performance.

It is worth considering one of the most important trends in modern management: inclusion. The concept has been researched extensively; all studies converge and show that there are important operational and financial advantages to adopt it.

Yet, people are struggling to find ways to implement inclusion and to sustain it beyond punctual actions. There is "D&I" fatigue, rumors of backlash over #meToo, and middle management still appears unconvinced of inclusion's benefits. A culture of inclusion is not an easy thing to achieve. It is indissociable from a focus on diversity and cultural transformation. Both take some resources and time to implement, because they require to institutionalize hard-to-replicate best practices. But the business performance gains make it worth the effort, and evolving employee demographics will keep the pressure on companies whatever the slowdowns and cycles.

On this #givingtuesday 2019, we wanted to publish our thoughts about why giving is related to Inclusion and how it can both launch inclusion and sustain it in the long term.

Giving, maybe counter-intuitively, is a core reason why humans need companies in order to achieve economic value - see more about this later in the article.

As it happens, women are better than men at giving. It is quite simple to illustrate that. First, women give twice more than men. In 2017, 64% of donations to nonprofits were made by women(1). Second, “generosity” is a word that women mentors often use to explain why they support other females in a company. They repeat it times and again in their ERGs, during mentoring events, or Gender Equality events. They like the idea to give and give back.

When asked the same question, men who support Gender Equality (let's call ourselves "male allies") as well as men who do not, prefer to use words like "equality", “fairness” and “caring about everyone”. It sounds like men tend to be more motivated by the idea of supporting overall equality, than by the idea of giving to others.

So, outside of companies, women tend to be more generous than men when it comes to give resources to a cause that benefits the whole: the society, a community or a group. Are we seeing the same phenomenon within companies? Is generosity the cement to a culture that enables women to feel included and to create sustainable inclusive virtuous cycles?

The hypothesis here is that a culture of giving is rewarding for a company for many reasons, and women could be the best qualified to give. They could also be the best positioned to reap the benefits of giving for their own careers. Note, we are not advancing here that there is a deterministic factor explaining that women are more generous than men, but that there could be a cultural effect at play.

There does not seem to be data to support or invalidate the hypothesis of an interrelation of giving and inclusion yet. We could not find a dedicated study in that field, and are hoping to test that idea throughout the coming year through primary research with Essteem and your feedback.

Below is a set of findings that secondary research provided.

In summary: Generosity may initiate sustainable cycles of inclusion.

• On the short-term, a culture of giving should be rewarding for a company because it should immediately increase productivity and profitability, for instance by reducing the time it takes to access information between employees.
• On the long-term, gifts and retro-gifts should support a culture of trust, engagement, recognition and inclusion by creating a virtuous cycle of mutual aid and inclusion, which is correlated with higher profitability.
• Giving could be considered as a lever for women to create more inclusion inside a company, promote their personal brand and achieve faster career growth.
• Recruiting more women could lead to innovative ways to achieving a culture of giving and its related efficiencies.

Giving can initiate virtuous cycles of trust

Different from contracting, giving is generally triggered by a request for help, and results in the production or allocation of resources to a person or entity, with no immediate compensation and no insurance of compensation. Despite this lack of security regarding compensation, it is usual for people to give back to someone who had given to them, so that they can be “even”.

Giving indeed creates a moral imbalance in favor of the donor, so that the recipient feels obliged to give back(3) (a social fact called “retro-gift”). This is why some do not like the term giving and prefer "sharing" to it, but there is precisely the same effect with sharing - as in sharing information, sharing access, sharing resources etc.

This obligation to give back is moral, not sanctioned by law. As a result, giving is an ethical relationship that both relies on, and establishes trust between individuals - without the option to use the services of an enforcing authority. Rules, contracts and laws do not rely on trust, and on the contrary enable not to trust someone to create a relationship, because both parties trust that an authority will enforce the rule.

Through its essence and through its ethics aspect, giving is related to the concept of engagement(4), which has been at the center of HR focus for the last decade.

The definition of engagement is to give yourself to a cause, a team or a project. Thanks to the moral aspect of giving, you engage people by giving them some of your time; and inversely, you feel morally engaged to give back to someone who gave you.

At a company level, multiplying the occasions when employees can give to each other will trigger a sense of engagement to the teams and to the company. But being offered a gift and feeling like one has to give back can also be felt as a forced engagement in some cases.

Through the risk that a giver takes never to be paid back, giving creates a certain vulnerability for the giver. And this is a key ingredient in creating trust. In turn, trust increases company efficiencies and profitability as it has been proven many times(5).

From there, it is possible to infer that gifts doubled with retro-gifts as they should be, create virtuous cycles of trust which increase profitability. In other words, the moral imbalance generated by giving can initiate and sustain profitability.

In parallel, giving is very adapted to deepening relationships inside a delimited social group, as opposed to contracts, which constitute a means to scale the amount of transactions outside of a group or across societies.

Another characteristic of giving is that it often implies to be asked for a free service, and to ask for a service in return, later at an undefined date. Knowing who to ask and how to ask is thus an important part of most relationships around a gift.

Let’s summarize giving as an act of virtuous moral imbalance increasing trust.

When thinking of the situation of minorities and especially women in the workplace, creating a culture of giving seems well adapted to answer hurdles felt in the day-to-day lives of millions of people at work. Indeed minorities often suffer from various barriers and lack of recognition. But at a more general level, when used at scale throughout an organization, giving can tremendous benefit and organization and its employees.

Giving in the workplace: look rather outside hierarchy

“Giving in the workplace” is very similar to “giving” in general. It has to be based on the same principles of moral imbalance with no immediate compensation and no insurance of compensation, otherwise it is not a gift anymore.

In the context of a company, giving means that a donating employee or group of employees (donor) helps a receiving employee or group of employees (receiver), by allocating resources that the receiver cannot easily access, while the donor entity is not contractually obligated to do so. This most frequently happens outside of a hierarchical relationship. Indeed, when there are hierarchical relationships, allocating resources to help one's co-workers is often related to a contractual transaction that leads to direct compensation in the form of a salary, bonus, or everyday business activity.

So being focused on one’s own work, with one’s own team, is not primarily giving - it is primarily contractual. To mitigate that, let's acknowledge that there are many organizations that do not feel hierarchical and there is a whole spectrum of managerial styles among and within companies. This is very related to engagement and purpose. In these organizations and managerial styles, allocating time to help co-workers may not feel contractual - and that may be the sign of a healthy culture - but it is still part of the job which implies a much lower level of uncertainty about the transaction and its return, which in turn changes its nature from a gift to a contractual relationship. It does not mean that you cannot “give more” to your manager, go beyond duty, or give additional time, feedback and mentoring to your direct report. If you do so, giving is appreciated as well because it is outside of the employment contract.

Outside of the immediate team, there is less hierarchy. It is part of anyone’s work ethics to try and support one’s co-workers, but there is usually less direct enforcement of it than within a team. So this is where "giving in the workplace" will usually be found.

In fact, sociological theory explains why giving in the workplace is found at all. Establishing non-contractual relationships within the organization to enable efficient collaboration is a crucial aspect of dynamic organization. Think of silos and how they prevent information to transact efficiently, innovation to happen effectively, and are often an unnecessary risk to companies. Avoiding bureaucratic transaction costs among individuals and groups is a major reason why humans invented organizations, and giving enables just that.

Performance always comes down to efficiently working together. And it is quite paradoxical to notice, in the context of our societies based on contract, law and immediate monetization, that giving is a great way to achieve higher profit margins, break barriers to information and reduce costs of transactions between silos.

Giving: an opportunity for women to bring performance to new levels?

In some pacific islands’ societies studied by ethnologists in the early 20th century, a gift recipient can pay back the moral imbalance by giving back to the community, instead of giving back to the donor directly.

Interestingly however, this was only true in giving cycles involving women(6). It shows that in some cases, women seem more generous than men when it comes to having in mind the greater benefit of society. It is possible to assume that this is due to cultural aspects, and that it is also true in our current societies, when we see that women give twice more than men to nonprofits. More research would be needed to support these assumptions, and would show by what measure giving back to the group rather than to the donor would be acceptable and in what context.

This concept of giving back to a group rather than to the initial donor is unique. Our hypothesis is that it could bring social interactions to a new level in contemporary workplaces. It is especially interesting that the people who made the initial gift feel like they are "even" when the recipient gives back to the group instead of themselves. Doesn't it mean that they weigh more the common well-being than their own?

From the perspective of a company, the fact that women may be able, more than men, to feel even when a retro-gift is made not - or not only - to themselves but also to the group, should be a factor of special interest to HR and D&I leaders. Several innovative human resource best practices may derive from there and could be applied indifferently to men and women.

Giving back to a group instead of the initial giver may be interesting both for the recipient and the donor when both share an interest in a same group’s success.

E.g. a gift recipient giving back to the group instead of the donor makes sense when donor and recipient are both going to get bonuses on a common group objective.

Giving back to the group could also work if both donor and recipient work for the same department inside a company where there is a substantial amount of internal competition, thus providing more chances to their department to win the competition, thus increasing visibility for many individuals from this department.

Another situation when it may make sense would be in the context of an enterprise resource group (ERG). For instance, if donor and recipient both belong to an ERG that supports LGBT, women or people of color, they both win when time or other resources are given back to the group.

At a high level, situations when giving back to a group implies economies of scale, network effect or any positive externalities for the donor can be a good use case for this configuration of retro-gift.

However, the recipient does not necessarily need to be part of the group or have shared interests in the group to give back to the group. In fact, if the recipient is not part of the group, giving part of the group may weigh more meaning to the initial donor. For instance, a woman might suggest to a male colleague that his support to a women ERG would be welcome, when he can, if he would like to do something in exchange of her help now. The timing and expression of this arrangement may differ according to personalities, status and culture.

However, this kind of "group retro-gift" seems to require clarity from the inception of the gift relationship, so that the donor actually feels like its initial gift is made "even" by the retro-gift to the community, and so that the recipient knows that giving back to a community can make things "even". So is it still a gift or an informal contract? As long as there is only a moral imbalance that requires an action from the recipient to make things "even", and that the timing and specific modalities of the payback are not known, it is a gift.

Benefits of a culture of giving for employers

Human resources department can greatly impact their organizations by implementing a culture of giving.

Aside from the immediate gains in terms of productivity and information sharing, giving impacts trust, engagement, recognition and inclusion. All of the above impact productivity, profitability, quality, absenteeism and turnover.

Our thesis is that giving can be the sparkle that many HR departments are seeking in order to create a culture of engagement, trust and inclusion.

1. Giving supports information sharing

A culture of giving is rewarding for a company, because it reduces the time it takes to access information.

Giving usually consists of giving access to human or data resources, giving time to explain how things work, giving feedback. So in all cases, giving facilitates access to relevant sources of information and decision.

If we take the example of engineering and most information intensive jobs today (for instance, 60% of jobs / functions that are not at risk with AI), limiting the time to find information is crucial in optimizing productivity.

A data scientist can spend 80% of her time getting the data right, rather than actually using her data science skills to model a predicted outcome. Any researcher spends at least 80% of their time researching information and researching the right way to express it.

A little help from a SME met in a corridor, from a colleague briefed on an ongoing research, or a feedback gained from a non-stakeholder can completely change the outcome and speed of project completion.

2. Giving initiates trust

As we have shown above, giving creates trust primarily thanks to the vulnerability it requires from a giver.

Trust in turn enables more giving - because it is easier to give when there is less risk not to be paid back: you can give more if you trust that you’re going to get more in exchange, at some point.

As a result, giving can be a solution to launch a powerful trust cycle in a company e.g. when internal tensions affect productivity. We will see later how giving can be instilled by small steps.

3. Giving means engagement.

As a reminder, giving extra time to a company or attention to someone is a great way to show one’s engagement. The two notions are closely intertwined.

Since the 2000’s many studies showed the profound impact of engagement on performance impact. For instance, stats by Gallup(7) show that there is a high correlation (of course correlation is not causation) between engagement and many performance metrics. If a company can have employees give themselves (engage themselves), it has chances to see:

• Profitability by +22%
• Productivity by +21%
• Client satisfaction by 1% for each 2% of engagement
• Quality defects on products and services -41%
• Absenteeism /6
• Illnesses /2
• Turnover /9

Note that employees in the US are way more engaged than in many other countries. The average for engagement in the US is 30% of employees, vs 13% globally. Anecdotally, the authors being French and Russian, we could observe that there is much more giving in the US than in these two countries - in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons.

4. Retro-gifts are recognition, and a vector of meritocracy

Saying that giving supports meritocratic organizations may seem quite bold.

In fact when a person gives some time, resource or attention, there is usually a return of the gift when the time is right. This retro-gift is a sign of recognition.

This is true for anyone at work, but for the purpose of this article we choose a gender-based example. Many women engineers lack recognition from their peers male engineers. All engineers gain at being recognized experts, but it is especially true for women who are usually a minority at work and struggle being recognized during meetings, through salary compensation or through promotions.

As a result, giving back to women is particularly important and can help instaure a culture of inclusion, and simply can help propel a talented female colleague to the top.

5. Giving and inclusion.

If giving back can be inclusive, an initial gift to a new hire enables this person to get on board much faster.

Giving some time to explain how the company works, giving information if information is hard to find will tremendously help the hire.

Simply giving a sign of welcome can change durably how a new hire considers the company culture and feels included since the beginning - which in turn impacts her performance with the company and her engagement - hence the company turnover.

Giving especially to all kinds of people without discrimination is directly related to inclusion. Indeed, it shows that one finds the recipient of the gift valuable enough to receive a gift. It implies that this person is trusted, that this person will be in a position to give back which shows one values the recipient, and it creates a moral bond that can create a sense of community for those that are coming from minorities.

Since women are more prone to give than men in many situations, recruiting more women - or making sure that women are given an equal chance at hire - could mechanically lead to a culture of giving.

Benefits of giving for women in tech and their male allies

Women in industries where they are under-represented can build trust and engagement through giving, and expertise recognition through retro-gifts.

Professional development: achieve faster career growth.

• Initiate a positive cycle for your company.
• Promote your personal brand
• Be recognized as an engaged leader.
• Engage others by giving them the right kind of resources.
• Be recognized as an expert / SME by giving and being given back.
• Gain better access to resources and information.
• Break silos beyond your team.
• Give back to a woman’s ERG, and ask others to repay you by giving to your community’s ERG.
• Giving goes with giving back, which means that the elevator is going to come back for you: people will help you in the future.
• Be inclusive.

Personal development: increase self-esteem

• Feel achievement in life by benefiting others and being recognized by them.
• Be happy because you simply giving to others and receive from them.
• Be proud to be an agent of change for your company.

Now what can male allies gain at giving - to women specifically?

• You have more chances of being given back something than by giving to a man.
• You will help make future leaders.
• You will gain a future leaders’ respect. So you will be helped in return.
• You will play a role in diversity.
• Since companies with more diversity are more profitable, you will earn more bonus and salary raises.
• You will be more engaged.
• You will have more chances to become a leader yourself, and you will be a better leader.
• You can be proud. You have understood - you have heard innumerable women complaining for a reason about inequalities and harassment at work. You can be proud to be one of the few to have paid attention. There are only 2 to 5% of men at meetings on Inclusion and Gender equality.

Giving: a call to diversify teams

Based on the elements above, it looks like a culture of giving could be a better fit with women than men, and that such a culture can reinforce the position of women in the workplace, placing them at the center of an HR program to increase the most strategic metrics in a company.

Recruiting and empowering women in men dominated teams should be a cornerstone to achieve better performance through giving.

More gender diversity should support a culture of giving and a culture of giving should support gender equality.

However, even if giving creates virtuous cycles that last on the long term, the processes to create more gifts in a company cannot be a unique, one-time effort, like hiring a single woman in a team that is male dominated. Companies who would like to implement a culture of giving should make sure that the diversity effort leads to more gifts, and that the effort is repeated at key moments of the employee life-cycle.

Notes

(1) Nonprofits source, “The Ultimate List Of Charitable Giving Statistics For 2018”, 2018 link ; The Nonprofit Times, “Studies Examine Men Vs. Women In Giving”, 2015 link

(2) Anna Marie Valerio and Katina Sawyer, Harvard Business Review, “The Men Who Mentor Women”, 2016, link

(3) Marcel Maus, The Gift, 1925, link

(4) Kahn W. Psychological conditions of personal engagement and disengagement at work. Acad Manage J 1990, link

(5) Paul J Zak, Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies, 2017, link

(6) Alain Caillé; Jean-Édouard Grésy, “the gift revolution : management reassessed based on anthropology“ - Original title In French : “La révolution du don : le management repensé à la lumière de l'anthropologie” 2014

(7) Gallup, “Gallup study: feeling good matters in the workplace”, poll to 25 million employees, in 189 countries, in 69 languages, 2005