Giving Something Back

Reflecting core values

Hewitt is not alone in making a major commitment to community work. Such is the scale of Deloitte's activity that the firm is in the process of putting together a national infrastructure team and local committee network to support its charitable work and improve communication between offices. This more formal organization will go by the name IMPACT and run with the motto, "Positive impact through community service."

IMPACT will focus on five areas — education, children, arts, health, and community events — predominantly offering help to local communities, although there will be room for some pro bono work. "The community needs our efforts more than our consultancy resources," says Erin Kavel, a senior manager at Deloitte Consulting's Atlanta office. She points to a park cleanup day last May supported by 600 consultants from the Atlanta office, and various offices' "adopt-a-family" schemes that supplied Christmas presents and dinners to families who would otherwise sit down at an empty table.
With the exception of ongoing school tutoring programs and financial reimbursement of costs for local projects, Deloitte prefers the big bang approach, often including a community service day when a large number of consultants are gathered together, perhaps for training. "Instead of
traditional team-building exercises like a golf day, we work with the local community. All events are voluntary, but they're always well attended. Consulting is a tough lifestyle, and these events mean people can meet others they haven't seen for ages and get out and have fun," says Kavel.
As far as Deloitte is concerned, its corporate citizen program reflects its core values of collaboration, teamwork, and delivering excellent results. Working relationships are cemented, junior employees can flex their leadership muscles, and everybody gets a buzz out of giving something back — on company time.

And they had better enjoy it, because IMPACT includes improved tracking and performance measurement that will, in the future, form part of employee evaluation. Explains Kavel, "Community service was always considered, but it was not measured, so it was hard to give credit to individuals. There are several areas we expect our people to be involved in, and community service will now be one of them."
Like Deloitte, Booz-Allen & Hamilton does not give money away freely, preferring to put its dollars behind employee efforts, a policy put in place by retired chairman and CEO Bill Stasior a decade ago. "One thing I knew was that I did not want to create a community service function that was, in essence, an accounts payable department. There had to be a better way to serve the community than by mailing off checks — something that captured the talents and spirit of our people," he says. Today, more than 3,000 people — one in three Booz-Allen employees around the world — are contributing time or raising money for nonprofit organizations.
The firm's program has three components: financial support for community projects that employees work on in their own time; pro bono assignments; and matching funds raised by staff for specific causes such as aid for victims of the Venezuela floods. Typically, matching contributions run up to $10,000, but the firm is about to dig more deeply into its pocket as it equals employee donations of $41,500 made over the holiday season to the Children's Hospital in Washington, DC.
With a total budget of about $2.5 million — including operational costs and pro bono work — the acting director of Booz-Allen's community service program, Charlie Givans, leads a team of five full-time staff as well as serves as the firm's director of operations. Projects range from support of local Boy Scout troops to pro bono work for the national Special Olympics, with Booz giving staff the flexibility to volunteer their time as long as this fits in with coworkers and clients. "Our major focus is in the U.S., but I want to reach out globally with an organized approach," says Givans, who plans to undertake just such a campaign over the next year. "But we must step very carefully in terms of different cultures and how we approach them, so there will be a need to work with local people."

The World is Your Neighborhood

Culture is also at the heart of PricewaterhouseCoopers' program. With a firmwide slogan coined after the merger — "Join us, together we can change the world" — PwC is taking a global stance and combining business aspects of the consultant's job with the idealistic nature of its people.
Lew Krulwich, senior partner of management consultancy services for the Americas, explains, "In my consulting
practice, there are 15,000 people. They're young and idealistic, they want to improve the world, and, no question, they want to link their lives with what they do at work. Our pro bono and community work address the people who work here and the people we'd like to hire. It's not about clients, and they probably don't even know about it. But if we can field staff with broad backgrounds and happy lives, our clients are happier."
PwC's work in the U.S. is predominantly dedicated to the education and employability of urban youth. These areas appeal to the idealist consultant, as well as pave the way to a longer-term advantage for the firm. "Our success depends on getting good people," says Krulwich. "Helping to improve education and getting people into jobs help us in the long run to get what we need to succeed."

Intent on promoting its global ambition, PwC has funded many projects that concentrate on multicultural issues. One such is support in terms of both time and money for an elementary school in Yonkers, NY. The joint effort with School 22 is called "The World is Your Neighborhood"; it encourages cross-language training and cross-cultural understanding. Leveraging its global network, PwC is supporting a pen pal scheme with Internet technology and contacts made with local schools through its offices in Madrid and Milan. Next year, it hopes to be able to help children cross the Atlantic in person.
About 25 staff are working on the project, mainly on company time when client work allows. "It's great fun and nice to do. School 22 meets the aspirations of our people and helps them learn the sensitivity needed to work in a multicultural environment — something that is very important to the
business," says Krulwich.
His view is reflected by the consultants who help out at the school. Liora Brener joined PwC last August and works as a strategy consultant to consumer goods companies. Her decision to join the firm was based, in part, on its up-front emphasis on local and national community involvement. "PwC is very supportive of volunteers. It's phenomenal that my job allows me to do both client work and community service. I would certainly like to continue. I have learned a lot from interacting with the kids and talking to them about what they do on a day-to-day basis," she says.
Adds School 22 program manager Mindy Young, "I've always believed that the private sector should give back, particularly to public education. When I attended public school in Colorado, multicultural awareness played no part at all. It's so neat preparing students to work in the global economy —
ultimately, they might work for us. This is a win-win situation for PwC and the students."

The "employability" element of the PwC program also ranges from loose ties to close links with the firm's aim of securing good people. At one end of the scale, consultants visit a university campus to help students prepare their resumes, while at the other, a recent project run out of the New York office has helped a shelter put recovering down-and-outs to work — some in the operational bowels of PwC's own building.
"This type of work is another experience that helps our consultants learn. They take their organizational skills to the community and come back having shared new experiences with a more diverse group of people of different backgrounds than theirs. For us, this is a basic skill, as consultants are dropped into new client situations that are often contentious. They come back from community work stronger and certainly happier. We need to recruit, retain, and motivate — and giving our staff a sense of fulfillment really helps," Krulwich claims.

Disseminating the experience

At Bain & Co., David Bechhofer, director of the Boston office, eschews idealism in favor of passion when it comes to choosing not-for-profit projects. Indeed, staff have to be passionate about a potential project before it goes through stiff selection criteria, including the organization's leader being committed to taking action on Bain's recommendations, a senior partner being keen to pursue the work, and consultancy resources being available.
As a strategy firm, Bain sticks to what it does best. A typical project will run for about three months and involve seven or eight people working on it for half of their working time. One example is a project for Aid Atlanta, the largest organization serving the AIDS community in the Southeast. "Originally, the organization's premise was to help gay men die with dignity," explains Bechhofer. "But two fundamental problems emerged: The disease had spread to more communities, and people weren't dying anymore. The organization faced a real strategy problem of how to change its focus."    
The Bain team surveyed other similar organizations before developing a strategy that Aid Atlanta adopted. The consultancy is also working with urban peace corps City Year to optimize its mission statement and find a way of extending its coverage from 11 to 25 U.S. cities, as well as to adopt its fair share of local schools.

"We staff pro bono work in the same way that we would staff any other project, matching case assignments with interests. But it's nearly always oversubscribed," says Bechhofer, himself a keen volunteer. "The people we hire all tend to have a passion about the community, but not-for-profit work is a different challenge. The metrics of change in a mission-driven — not profit-driven — culture are less simple than in a for-profit situation. You've got to deal with people, quality, and long-term issues. Personal influence skills are at a premium. As in client projects, you have to learn the business, but you also have to earn the right to add value."
Bain does not give money to charity, leaving such decisions to individuals, and runs only the occasional community service day, believing that the organizations it supports have most to gain from its assets. Consultants, too, have much to gain, says Bechhofer. "Consultants come back from not-for-profit work with renewed passion about the impact they can have. The for-profit world is getting very cynical. Its measures are crazy and not very human — it's all about money, stock price, and compensation."

With thousands of consulting hours already committed to those less fortunate than itself, Bain is about to up the ante by launching its own not-for-profit organization, The Bridge Group. Its aim will be to bring strategic consulting capability to the nonprofit sector in ways that drive significant, sustainable impact. It plans to achieve this through consulting relationships that have a direct impact on the capability and performance of a broad array of high-potential not-for-profits, and through other activities that distill and disseminate the experience and knowledge it has developed through consulting. The group's measure of success? The extent to which a not-for-profit achieves breakthrough results in performance. Just another day — but not another dollar.

Sidebar: Power Points:

• Consulting firms assert that their pro bono work reflects their core values of collaboration, teamwork, and delivering excellent results. Working relationships are cemented, junior employees can flex their leadership muscles, and everybody gets a buzz out of giving something back.

• Pro bono work allows firms to give consultants the opportunity to volunteer their time as long as this fits in with coworkers and clients. With pro bono budgets often averaging several million dollars, the variety of pro bono projects ranges from support of local Boy Scout troops to helping the national Special Olympics.

• At most firms, if you're interested in pro bono work, you make it known, make proposals, and look for people who are interested in doing it — if there's interest from top management,  your efforts are far more likely to succeed.

Sidebar: Building Skills Outside Corporate Walls

Reggie Van Lee, a vice president and managing partner in Booz-Allen & Hamilton's communications, media, and technology industry practice in New York City, undertakes a couple of pro bono engagements a year. He describes the work as change management in an environment that is very sensitive to people and cultural issues.
Among the pro bono assignments he has taken, Van Lee has worked with America's first historic black college, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. "The university was suffering two problems — bad administration and a poor PR image. The president had been ousted under the cloud of misappropriation of funds and the new president wanted an independent third party to help with a strategy assessment and create a new plan," he explains. "It was important that the third party be objective and have some clout with the professors, administrators, and students. A small consultancy wouldn't have given the same impression as Booz-Allen."

A friend got Van Lee interested in the project, which he then proposed to Bill Stasior and Ralph Shrader. With their support, it went ahead. Two full-time consultants worked on the 12-week engagement, overseen on a one-day-a-week basis by Van Lee and a couple of other senior associates. The project concluded last November, with the university embracing the plan and proceeding to carry it out, leading Van Lee to comment, "If you can change a university, there are not many companies you can't change."
Van Lee's current pro bono work is dedicated to the Studio Museum of Harlem, the only African-American museum accredited by the U.S. Association of Museums. He is on the board of the New York Museum and is developing a strategy review for the Harlem museum with the new chief executive. He expects to deliver his final report in April.
"At Booz-Allen, if you're interested in pro bono work, you make it known, make proposals, and look for people who are interested in doing it — if they're not interested, it won't work so well. You're dealing with complexity of content and strategy, plus deep cultural and behavioral issues, which all help consultants build their skills. It's very refreshing — I'm doing a good job, and being appreciated for what I do. All too often you can do good work at a client, and all they do is give you a hard time."