The Future of Successful Companies Lies in Giving Back
- rmclements10
- Apr 16
- 18 min read
The companies that will win the talent war over the next decade are not necessarily the ones paying the highest salaries or offering the most exotic perks. And they will not be the ones who have the latest or greatest tech. They are the ones that have figured out something fundamental about what the emerging workforce actually wants from work and they have built systems to deliver it.
Integrating a structured social impact program into the core of how your company operates - what has become known as the 1-1-1 model - is one of the most defensible growth investments a company can make in 2026. I’ve pulled recent data from Deloitte, Benevity, Twilio, Salesforce, IBM, TIAA, and the Association of Corporate Citizenship Professionals to tell that story with specificity.
Why this matters now Gen Z represents nearly 30% of the global workforce in 2026. They are not teenagers anymore. Their average job tenure in the first five years of their career is 1.1 years - far shorter than any generation before them. Retaining them requires something beyond compensation. This document shows what that something is, and what companies that have cracked the code are doing differently. |
Part One: Something Has Shifted
There is a story worth telling before we get to the numbers.
A few years ago, a Microsoft employee named Jesse Weissman joined the company not thinking much about volunteering. Within a year, he had started mentoring students of color through a partnership with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Within two years, he was organizing speaking opportunities for colleagues through Microsoft’s Black employee affinity group. When asked recently whether a volunteer program would factor into his decision if he were looking at a new employer, his answer was unambiguous: it would be a serious consideration.
Jesse’s story is not exceptional. It is increasingly the norm. And it represents a larger shift in how people >> especially people entering the workforce right now << think about the relationship between their job and their identity.
For decades, the dominant model of employee motivation was essentially transactional. You show up, you perform, you get paid. Meaning came from outside work - from family, from faith, from community. The job was the means, not the end.
Something has changed. Work has moved to the center of identity for a generation of people who grew up during a pandemic, a global reckoning on racial justice, and an accelerating climate crisis. They watched institutions fail. They watched companies make promises and break them. And they came into the workforce with a clear-eyed skepticism about corporate motives and a fierce clarity about their own values.
The Deloitte 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey, which interviewed over 23,000 people across 30+ countries, found that 89% of Gen Z consider a sense of purpose to be very or somewhat important for their job satisfaction and well-being. Forty-four percent have already left a job they felt lacked purpose. Around 40% have turned down an assignment, promotion, or even a job offer because it conflicted with their values.
“If a company isn’t serious about purpose, I won’t stay.” - Millennial employee, Deloitte 2025 Survey
These are not soft preferences. They are career-defining decisions being made at scale. And the companies that understand this are responding not with ping-pong tables or wellness stipends, but with something that goes deeper: genuine investment in the communities their employees care about, structured into the operating model of the business. If companies want to attract or retain top tier, innovative talent they need to learn to give.
Part Two: Where Things Stand
The participation gap
Before making the case for why companies should invest in social impact programs, it is worth being honest about where things currently stand.
Corporate volunteerism participation is on the rise. The ACCP’s 2025 CSR Insights Survey found that 61% of CSR professionals reported increased employee participation in workplace volunteer programs - the third consecutive year of growth. Benevity’s 2024 State of Corporate Volunteering report documented a 57% year-over-year increase in global employee volunteering participation rates.
BUT - only 49% of U.S. companies offer community volunteer programs as a benefit at all. In a country where the talent competition is intensifying, fewer than half of employers have taken even the first step.
Formal, structured volunteer programs with dedicated staff, paid volunteer time off, and measurement infrastructure are overwhelmingly concentrated in large enterprises. The Fortune 500, financial services, energy, and technology sectors lead the field. Smaller and mid-market companies - which face the same talent competition for Gen Z workers - are largely absent. If you are a smaller, mid-market company and don’t have the budget to compete on salary, talk about an easy way to stay competitive.
49% of U.S. companies offer any volunteer program (SHRM, 2024) | 61% of CSR professionals report rising participation (ACCP, 2025) | 57% YoY increase in global volunteering rates (Benevity, 2024) |
Who leads - and why
The sectors with the deepest, most sustained volunteer programs are not the ones you might expect. Energy and utilities, finance and insurance, and professional services consistently outperform technology in terms of program maturity, employee participation rates, and institutional commitment. These are industries with long regulatory relationships with their communities, reputational skin in the game, and decades of infrastructure investment.
Technology companies get more press for their CSR programs, partly because companies like Salesforce and Microsoft have been unusually transparent about their results. But the data from Benevity’s client base suggests that a pharmaceutical company or a regional bank is statistically more likely to have a well-established volunteer program with high awareness and participation than a startup or a growth-stage tech company.
The implication for mid-market companies is significant: the competitive window is wide open. The talent you are competing for has higher expectations for purpose-driven work than any prior generation. And the majority of your competitors have not yet met those expectations.
Part Three: The 1-1-1 Model - What It Is
In 1999, when Salesforce was founded with a handful of employees and no revenue, CEO Marc Benioff made an unusual decision: he committed 1% of the company’s equity, 1% of its products, and 1% of its employees’ time to the community - largely due to his personal beliefs that companies should “do well and do good”.
The logic was not primarily philanthropic. It was cultural. Benioff wanted purpose baked into the company’s DNA from the first day, not retrofitted after the company became profitable. He believed - and the subsequent 25 years of data have validated - that companies have a responsibility to use their platform to give back AND that with this kind of structural commitment to community impact are more attractive to employees, more trusted by customers, and more resilient as organizations.
That framework became the 1-1-1 model. Pledge 1%, the movement it spawned, now counts more than 10,000 companies in over 100 countries as members.
What the 1-1-1 model actually means The 1-1-1 model is a framework, not a formula. It asks companies to commit a percentage - typically 1% - of some combination of three things:
Companies can pledge any combination of the three. The flexibility is intentional. A pre-revenue startup can pledge equity. A services firm can pledge time and pro bono expertise. A software company can pledge product licenses. The point is not the specific mechanism - it is the structural, deliberate, pre-committed nature of the investment. |
What distinguishes the companies getting real results from those merely checking a box is not the pledge itself; it is the infrastructure they build around it. The companies that treat this as a business function, not an afterthought or a charitable gesture, are the ones whose employees actually participate, whose programs actually retain talent, and whose brands actually benefit.
What does that infrastructure look like?
It means dedicated headcount (Salesforce’s VTO team has 25 people).
It means published, trackable goals (IBM set a public target of 4 million volunteer hours by end of 2025).
It means proprietary technology to manage and measure participation (Salesforce built Volunteerforce; multiple others use platforms like Benevity or YourCause).
It means integrating volunteer participation data with HR and engagement data so you can actually see the ROI.
It means treating social impact the way you treat any other operating function: with strategy, measurement, leadership accountability, and continuous improvement.
Part Four: What the Data Actually Shows
I am constantly at odds with my capitalist brother-in-law who could care less about my dreams to save the world and wants to know how any of my ideas are actually going to result in business growth.
So….. I’m going to prove that giving back can actually make your business grow.
On retention
Employee turnover is the most tangible cost in the talent equation. Replacing an employee typically costs between 50% and 100% of their annual salary once you account for recruiting, onboarding, and the productivity ramp. For a company with 200 employees and average compensation of $80,000, reducing annual turnover by even 10 percentage points is worth millions.
Benevity’s Impact Labs Talent Retention Study found that employees deeply engaged in corporate purpose programs - including volunteering and giving - show 57% lower turnover than their less-engaged peers.
Employees who participate in these programs are 52% less likely to leave their company. 52%
After launching WePledge in 2019 - its version of the 1-1-1 model - Twilio tracked the retention of participating versus non-participating employees. The result:
Employees who donated and volunteered were 2.3 times less likely to leave than those who did not
Participation in the program grew from single digits to over 50% of the company’s workforce.
2.3× less likely to leave | Twilio After launching WePledge 1% in 2019, Twilio tracked retention across its workforce. Employees who participated in giving and volunteering programs were 2.3x less likely to leave than non-participants. Program participation grew from single digits to over 50% of the company. Twilio subsequently built an accelerator to help 25 other companies, including Atlassian, Zoom, and Okta, replicate the model. |
On engagement
Gallup’s data shows that only 33% of U.S. employees are genuinely engaged at work - a number that has barely moved in a decade. The cost of that disengagement, in productivity and turnover, is enormous. Research from the same organization shows that highly engaged business units outperform peers by 23% in profitability. << (This is a good time to remind you that I work as a consultant to increase employee engagement)
Salesforce’s internal data is instructive here: they attribute a 3-point increase in employee engagement - from 82% to 85% - to their VTO program in a single year. At a company of 70,000+ people, moving the engagement needle by 3 points is an enormous organizational achievement. Salesforce’s engagement rates are consistently among the highest in the industry, and they explicitly credit their philanthropic culture as a driver.
TIAA went further, conducting a direct comparison study: employees who participated in CSR and volunteer opportunities were more likely to stay employed and more likely to recommend TIAA as a place to work. That second metric - likelihood to recommend as an employer - is an employer brand signal with direct recruiting implications. Every positive recommendation reduces the cost of your next hire. If anyone has looked at their company’s Glassdoor reviews, which are notoriously brutal and unforgiving and scare away potential applicants, this should be important.
57% lower turnover among employees engaged in giving & volunteering (Benevity) | 23% higher profitability at companies with highly engaged employees (Gallup) |
On brand and reputation
This is one of my personal favorite selling points when trying to convince CEOs to invest in a corporate social impact strategy because it’s all about marketing and PR. EASY. GOOD. Marketing and PR. That costs a fraction of paying for Google or Meta ads.
Edelman’s 2025 Brand Trust Report found that 64% of respondents buy, choose, or avoid brands based on their beliefs about what companies stand for socially. One in two respondents assume the worst when a brand is silent on social issues. The 2024 Trust Barometer found that trust in companies has become a “buy or boycott” factor for 71% of global consumers.
A 2024 SSRN research review found that companies which internalize CSR into their core business strategy consistently enhance brand reputation and improve consumer credibility. The key word is “internalize” - authentic, ongoing commitment builds trust in a way that sporadic charity events do not.
Companies investing in social purpose have a 6% higher market value and generate 20% more revenue than companies that do not, according to Project ROI.
Purpose-driven brands outperform competitors in the stock market by 120% over time.
(If you want to text this study to your brother in law - here is the link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/afdhelaziz/2020/03/07/the-power-of-purpose-the-business-case-for-purpose-all-the-data-you-were-looking-for-pt-1/)
Part Five: The Generation That Changed the Equation
There is a tendency to treat “Gen Z wants purpose” as a soft observation - the kind of thing you note and then set aside when making real business decisions. That is a mistake. The data on Gen Z and workplace purpose is not soft. It is behavioral. (I’ll be screaming this into the void until I die - humans matter - culture matters - people skills matter)
Gen Z represents nearly 30% of the global workforce in 2026.
They are not teenagers anymore - they are your colleagues. They are running and building more companies before they hit 21 than you and I have in our entire lives.
Their average job tenure in the first five years of their career is 1.1 years - compared to 1.8 years for Millennials, 2.8 for Gen X, and 2.9 for Boomers. That is a Randstad finding from a global survey of 11,250 workers across 15 markets, published in 2025. This is not a generation that drifts. They leave intentionally. And they leave when they do not find what they are looking for.
What are they looking for? The Junior Achievement/Ipsos survey that asked this question directly found that 87% of Gen Z believe companies that offer employee volunteer opportunities strengthen the community, and 72% said they would want to work for companies that offer those opportunities. Seventy-five percent evaluate potential employers specifically based on their community engagement efforts. These are not nice-to-haves in the minds of Gen Z candidates. They are decision criteria. Now think about how much it costs to hire a new employee vs. the cost of retaining one and then add in the cost of retaining a high performer vs. a disengaged employee. Do you see how it’s all connected? The actual cost to your business of NOT giving back?
The Gen Z workforce: what the research shows • 89% consider purpose very or somewhat important to job satisfaction (Deloitte, 2025) • 44% have left a job they felt lacked purpose (Deloitte, 2025) • 74% put purpose ahead of their paycheck (Monster/Gen Z survey) • 75% evaluate employers specifically on community engagement (Infeedo, 2025) • 72% would specifically seek employers that offer volunteer opportunities (JA/Ipsos, 2023) • 87% believe companies with volunteer programs strengthen their community (JA/Ipsos, 2023) • Average tenure in first 5 years: 1.1 years - the shortest of any generation on record (Randstad, 2025) |
Research from DoSomething Strategic, conducted with the American Red Cross, identified three things Gen Z requires from volunteer engagement:
community impact
authentic connection
career development
They are not interested in corporate theater - a single day of painting a community center and posting photos on Instagram. They want to see evidence that their time created a real outcome. They want to work alongside people they trust. And they want the experience to matter to their professional trajectory.
The career development dimension is particularly important for employers to understand.
Sixty-four percent of Gen Z employees report gaining new skills through volunteering.
Seventy-one percent say it improves their teamwork and camaraderie at work.
Skills-based volunteering - where employees contribute professional expertise to nonprofits rather than just their labor - is the format Gen Z responds to most strongly. It connects directly to their career ambitions while delivering deeper impact for the organizations they serve.
This is the virtuous loop that the best programs create: a Gen Z employee volunteers their professional skills, develops new capabilities, builds relationships with colleagues, feels seen by their employer, and stays. The company gets a more skilled, more loyal employee and a stronger employer brand. The nonprofit gets meaningful expertise. Everyone wins.
Part Six: Companies That Are Doing This Right
The following cases are not chosen because they have the most impressive PR. They are chosen because they have the most transparent data - and the most instructive lessons.
Salesforce: The model that started a movement
Salesforce did not build its 1-1-1 model after it became successful. It was baked in from the founding. Marc Benioff pledged equity, product, and employee time before the company had its first customers. That key commitment from leadership with strategic and financial support is the total game-changer when it comes to trying to start a CSR program.
The results, 25 years later: employees have collectively delivered 10 million volunteer hours across 43,000 nonprofits in 48 countries. Approximately 75% of Salesforce’s 73,000-person global workforce participates in the VTO program. Employee engagement increased from 82% to 85% in a single year of intensive program investment. The company consistently ranks among the best places to work.
The model also influenced an industry. Pledge 1%, which Salesforce co-founded, has now enrolled more than 10,000 companies in 100+ countries. The cumulative value of their pledged equity, time, and product donations exceeds $1 billion.
What Salesforce understood early is that the model requires infrastructure to work. Their internal volunteer management platform, Volunteerforce, lets employees log hours, organize team activities, and find opportunities matched to their skills. Their team dedicated to the VTO program has 25 people. The measurement systems are sophisticated enough to connect volunteer participation to engagement and retention metrics.
AKA - they are putting money and manpower into making it work.
10M volunteer hours delivered | Salesforce 10 million volunteer hours. 75% workforce participation. Employee engagement grew 3 points in a single year. The 1-1-1 model inspired Pledge 1%, now 10,000+ companies globally. Salesforce’s approach shows that purpose-driven culture requires the same investment as any other operating function: dedicated people, technology, and measurement. |
Twilio: The most compelling internal data set
Twilio is less well-known than Salesforce but has produced the most directly useful data for companies considering this kind of investment. When Twilio launched WePledge in 2019, they did something important: they tracked it. I’m sure there are a ton of companies successfully running programs but they aren’t tracking it thus they don’t get to show it off. Specifically, they tracked and compared the retention rates of employees who participated in giving and volunteering programs against those who did not.
The result was a 2.3x retention difference. Employees who donated and volunteered were more than twice as likely to still be at Twilio at the end of the measurement period. Participation in the program grew from single digits - the baseline for most companies with no active program - to over 50% of the workforce.
Twilio took this a step further by building the WePledge Accelerator, a program to help other companies replicate the model. The first cohort included Atlassian, Zoom, and Okta. That is worth noting: companies that have built successful programs are actively helping competitors build theirs, because they understand that the purpose economy is not a zero-sum game. A rising tide raises all boats.
4,000 employees deployed globally | IBM IBM’s Community Service Program dates to the 1960s. Its Service Corps, modeled on the Peace Corps, has sent 4,000 employees to 40 countries on pro bono assignments. IBM’s VP of Corporate Citizenship described it directly: “It’s not just philanthropy. It’s leadership development and business development.” IBM set a public goal of 4 million volunteer hours by 2025 - a hard, trackable commitment. |
TIAA: The financial services model
TIAA’s approach is instructive for companies outside of tech. The financial services firm ran a direct internal study comparing employees who participated in CSR and volunteer programs against those who did not. The correlation was clear: participating employees were more likely to stay employed and more likely to recommend TIAA as an employer to their friends and colleagues.
Employee Net Promoter Score - the likelihood of employees to recommend their company as a place to work - is directly tied to recruiting costs and talent quality. Every positive recommendation from a current employee reduces the cost of the next hire. TIAA’s study showed that the volunteer program moved this needle directly.
Part Seven: How to Build This for Your Company
The case has been made. The question that follows is practical: how does a company - particularly one that is not a Fortune 500 with a dedicated CSR team - actually build this?
The honest answer is that you do not need to start with all three pillars of the 1-1-1 model, a 25-person team, or a proprietary technology platform. What you need is structural commitment and intentional design. The companies seeing results are not necessarily the ones spending the most - they are the ones treating social impact as a real operating function, with real accountability, real measurement, and real leadership investment.
Here is a practical framework for building a program that works:
Get leadership skin in the game.
Start with a visible commitment from the top. The single biggest predictor of whether a volunteer program actually generates engagement is whether senior leadership participates and talks about it. A CEO who volunteers alongside employees, who mentions the program in all-hands meetings, who ties it to the company’s values in recruiting conversations - that signals changes behavior at scale. Programs that live entirely in HR never achieve the same participation rates as programs that are explicitly championed by the leadership team. PERIOD.
Offer choice.
Give employees real choice. Do NOT tie it to OKRs. Benevity’s research found that when companies offer both company-organized volunteer opportunities and employee-initiated options - letting people support causes they personally care about - participation rates increase an average of 12x compared to programs with only company-directed activities. The data is unambiguous: autonomy drives engagement. Build a structure, then let people fill it with what matters to them.
Make it paid time.
Seriously. It’s an easy ask. Paid volunteer time off is the single biggest structural driver of participation. It sends an unambiguous signal: this is not something we want you to do on your own time. It is part of how we operate. The SHRM 2024 survey found that only 28% of companies currently offer paid VTO - but that number is growing. You are asking your employees to represent your brand when they are out in the community doing good - the least you can do is pay them. Starting with even 8 hours per employee per year costs relatively little and communicates a great deal.
Invest in skills-based formats.
Skills-based volunteering is more resonant with Gen Z than traditional service. Instead of asking employees to paint a fence or pack food boxes, ask them to contribute what they are actually good at: financial modeling for a nonprofit, marketing strategy for a community organization, software development for a school. This is the absolute key to the return on your investment. Sure, a hiking trail clean up as a team is fun but the sustainability of skills-based volunteering is MASSIVE. The impact is deeper, the learning is real, and the Gen Z employee who wants their volunteer experience to matter to their career will engage at a much higher rate.
Measure everything, report it honestly.
You cannot improve what you do not measure. Don’t be afraid to start at zero - there is only up to go. And you’re already ahead of most of your competitors. Connect volunteer participation data to your HR and engagement systems. Track participation by department. Ask employees in your engagement surveys whether the volunteer program contributed to their sense of connection and purpose at work. Run a simple cohort analysis comparing retention rates of participants versus non-participants, as Twilio and TIAA did. These data points are the evidence you will need when your CFO asks whether this is worth the investment - and they will ask.
Tell the story internally.
Sharing the outcomes internally is as important as the program itself. When employees see real stories - a colleague whose skills helped a nonprofit raise more funding, a team that helped a school launch a STEM curriculum, an employee whose pro bono legal work changed a family’s situation - it deepens the meaning of the program for everyone, including those who have not yet participated. Bonus if you provide a platform for employees to tell their personal experience stories to their colleagues via a town hall interview, a podcast guest, or an Intranet guest post. They are now the champions of the program and recruiting their colleagues via passion instead of you. The story of impact is the recruitment engine for the program itself.
Part Eight: The Bigger Picture
Data that shows a MASSIVE return on investment?
Those numbers are essential but a little bit more difficult to calculate, which is why you need to do it. Retention savings, engagement lifts, and employer brand metrics.
The generation entering the workforce right now came of age in a world that felt - and often was - broken. They watched a pandemic dismantle the assumptions their parents had built careers around. They watched inequality become more visible than it had been in a generation. They watched climate change shift from a future concern to a present reality. And they came to work not with the goal of leaving all of that at the door, but with a deep desire to be part of addressing it.
The companies that are winning with this generation are not the ones that have figured out how to manage it. They are the ones that have recognized it as a genuine signal - that the workforce is telling them something important about what sustainable business looks like, and they have had the organizational courage to respond.
What the 1-1-1 model represents, at its best, is not a PR strategy or a talent hack. It is a philosophy: that the best version of a company is one that uses its resources - its people, its products, its capital - not just to generate returns for shareholders, but to make a material difference in the communities it operates in. And it turns out that this philosophy, executed with real commitment and real infrastructure, also generates superior returns for shareholders. The two are not in tension; they are inseparable.
“The business of business is improving the state of the world.” - Marc Benioff, Salesforce
The companies that will attract the best talent in 2026 and beyond have figured this out and are letting it drive operations. The window to be an early mover in this space, particularly for mid-market companies, is still open. But it is narrowing.
The question is not whether your company can afford to invest in giving back.
The question is whether you can afford not to.
Sources and Research Notes
All data points in this case study are drawn from published research. Key sources include:
Benevity Impact Labs: 2024 State of Corporate Volunteering; 2025 State of Corporate Purpose; Talent Retention Study
Deloitte Global: 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey (23,000+ respondents, 30+ countries); 2024 Gen Z and Millennial Survey
Association of Corporate Citizenship Professionals (ACCP): 2025 CSR Insights Survey
Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM): 2024 Employee Benefits Survey
Edelman: 2024 Trust Barometer; 2025 Brand Trust Report
Randstad: Gen Z Workplace Blueprint (2025), global survey of 11,250 workers in 15 markets
Junior Achievement / Ipsos: Multi-generational survey on volunteering and employer perception (2023)
DoSomething Strategic / American Red Cross: What Gen Z Wants research series
Project ROI: Business value of CSR investment analysis
Salesforce: 10 Million Volunteer Hours milestone report (2025); VTO program participation data
Twilio: WePledge internal retention data; WePledge Accelerator program
IBM: IBM Volunteers and IBM Service Corps program history and outcomes
TIAA: Internal CSR and employee retention correlation study
Gallup: State of the American Workplace employee engagement data
Fortune: Best Companies to Work For research; corporate volunteer program reporting (2024)
A note on methodology This document synthesizes published research and company-reported data. Where company-specific figures are cited (e.g., Twilio’s 2.3x retention finding; Salesforce’s engagement lift), these are drawn from publicly available company communications and third-party reporting. Cross-industry aggregate figures (e.g., Benevity’s 57% turnover reduction) are from platform-level analyses disclosed in published reports. Readers building internal business cases are encouraged to request primary data from research providers and to run comparable cohort analyses with their own employee datasets. |
Comments