Expanding the notion of corporate benefits beyond discounted health-club memberships and low insurance rates, a group of major companies is set to offer employees access to cheaper solar systems for the home.

Under an arrangement announced Wednesday, employees of the companies — Cisco Systems, 3M, Kimberly-Clark and National Geographic — will be able to buy or lease solar systems for their homes at rates substantially lower than the national average, executives said. The program, offered through Geostellar, an online marketer of solar systems, will be available to more than 100,000 employees and will include options for their friends and families in the United States and parts of Canada.

Conceived at the World Wildlife Fund, the program, called the Solar Community Initiative, aims to use the bulk buying power of employees to allow for discounts on home systems.

The program’s expansion is a reflection of the shrinking gulf between camps that were once considered mutually exclusive: environmental advocacy organizations and mainstream corporate America. “Our objective was to make this as simple and cheap as possible,” said Keya Chatterjee, senior director for renewable energy at the World Wildlife Fund. After receiving discounts through a group program for employees last year, officials at the environmental group approached a few of their corporate partners, she said.

For Geostellar, which built a virtual marketplace from satellite imagery and big data, it offers a new route to attracting customers, which is still one of the more stubbornly high costs of operating a solar business.

Other solar companies have established corporate partnerships to funnel new customers to them. SolarCity, for instance, recently announced that it was renewing a deal with Honda that provides its systems to the automaker’s customers at a discount.

“It’s over 100,000 people who are all prequalified because they have good jobs,” said David Levine, chief executive of Geostellar.

For the companies, the arrangement offers a way to attract and retain a workforce that is increasingly attuned to the environment and to the steps employers take to preserve it.

“I get the emails: ‘Why aren’t we recycling this, or why don’t we have 45,000 more electric vehicle charging stations?’” said Ali Ahmed, who manages energy and sustainability at Cisco. “So we had a really good feeling that our employees would engage and latch onto this kind of discount.”

That interest is already evident, the companies said. Three Cisco executives have already decided to install solar systems in their homes through Geostellar, Levine said.