‘Job purposing’ is making meaningful contributions to others or societal causes as part of regular work. Caesars showed that helping its sales and conventions departments job purpose was a promising pathway to dramatically
augmenting its ESG work — and, thus, its positive societal impact.
What do the sales, procurement and ESG (environment, social, governance)
functions have in common? Accelerating social justice is unlikely anybody’s
answer, yet Caesars Entertainment has earned the
right to give it. (Full disclosure: I’m an ESG advisor to the company’s
leadership.)
The 2018 Caesars corporate social responsibility (CSR) team, led by Gwen
Migita, saw the need for convening a
cohort of corporate brands and key
nonprofits
to accelerate progress on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) across corporate
America. The CSR department, however, did not have the budget for such a pricey
event. The team’s stroke of genius was realizing that the meetings and
conventions department already held events that might be redesigned to meet the
identified DEI need — specifically, the department hosted representatives from
Caesars’ key business partners at a Caesars resort every year to showcase the
company’s meetings and conventions prowess, relationship-building and sales. The
question the CSR team put to their meetings and conventions colleagues was,
“What if your sales events included the social-purpose objective of accelerating
DEI in corporate America?”
The meetings and conventions team was excited to promote justice as part of its
everyday work. It also thought pursuing ESG as part of its annual sales meeting
might help it deepen brand loyalty and reach new prospects. The procurement
department similarly considered the CSR team’s idea a promising way to build
relationships and work more effectively with vendors, their key stakeholders.
As a result, the three departments — meetings and conventions, procurement and
CSR — worked together to hold the first Caesars DEI Summit in October 2019 at
the Paris Las Vegas resort. 48 leaders from companies and nonprofits
attended — including 100 Black Men of America, Amazon, AT&T,
Constellation Brands, Disability:IN, Microsoft, Siemens,
Sysco, US Black Chambers and the US Pan Asian American Chamber of
Commerce. Against the backdrop of Caesars’ hospitality, attendees shared best
practices, challenges and ideas for advancing
DEI.
They also gathered in small groups to problem-solve DEI challenges and created
four cross-sector task forces to continue the work started at the Summit.
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Did the 2019 Caesars DEI Summit succeed? It appears it did: Post-event
participant measures of satisfaction and interest in continuing the work
exceeded 90 percent. Furthermore, despite the macro
disruptions
of the last few years, participants have kept two of the task forces active and
have produced a white
paper
promoting racial equity as an investment criterion. What’s more, responses to a
follow-up survey conducted two years later suggested that the summit helped 100
percent of the attendees better advance their DEI efforts. In terms of business
results, Caesars meetings and conventions found the Summit performed at least as
well in developing business as its prior (non-ESG-related) events. The Summit
was also a procurement department success.
“Supporting our key vendors with their DEI initiatives strengthens our
partnerships,” says Jessica Medei
Rosman, SVP of operations and
executive associate to the CFO. Medei Rosman, who was involved in the 2019 DEI
Summit from its inception, further explained that the Summit allowed vendors “to
be better partners to us by helping us meet our broader goals around economic
inclusion and second-tier diverse spend.”
Most indicative of the success of the 2019 Summit is that, despite Migita’s
departure from Caesars, a second DEI Summit was held in April 2022. It, too, was
well received. 90 percent of survey respondents gave it an overall rating of
five out of five, and plans are underway for a 2023 summit. Heather
Rapp, Caesars’ SVP of CSR,
says the best is yet to come: “We’re excited to continue to partner with such an
illustrious group of organizations to help make social justice the norm in
corporate America.”
The Caesars DEI summits are a superb example of what I’ve termed “job
purposing”
— defined as making meaningful contributions to others or societal causes as
part of regular work. In this case, the sales function was “purposed.” Caesars
demonstrates that helping other departments job purpose is a promising pathway
to dramatically augmenting a company’s ESG work — and, thus, its positive
societal impact.
Published Sep 30, 2022 2pm EDT / 11am PDT / 7pm BST / 8pm CEST
President and Founder
VeraWorks
Bea Boccalandro is founder and president of VeraWorks, a global advisory firm that helps companies ignite purpose at work, and author of "Do Good at Work: How Simple Acts of Social Purpose Drive Success and Wellbeing" (2020).