A good employee volunteer program will not only help in boosting employee engagement, but also in giving back to the communities worldwide. It has been seeing a real boost in the corporate sector in the form of paid volunteering time off, boost productivity, and even for the sake of employees doing activities together.
As studies show, The Chief Executives for Corporate Purpose—a global coalition of multibillion-dollar companies—reports that 66% of its member firms offered paid-time-off volunteer programs in 2019, compared with 56% in 2016.
Benefits of Employee Volunteer Program
Why should you use an employee volunteer program for your organization? Here are a few reasons why you should benefit an employee volunteer program:
- It encourages employees to work and give back to the community
- It helps in boosting employee engagement
- It showcases that your organization goes over and above mere tasks and deadlines, that it cares.
- It helps in improving employee retention and boost employee morale
- It helps in improving employee productivity
How to structure your employee volunteering programs?
Corporate volunteering programs can follow any particular structure: either give employees the option to decide their areas or cause that they want to volunteer in or simply choose certain programs for them and ask employees to participate.
But it is advisable to not copy this structure from other organizations. Each organization has people with different mindsets, age groups, etc. Start with a volunteering policy and pick up ideas that tailor to your employees’ satisfaction and preferences.
X Employee Volunteering Program Ideas
Education and Teaching
Under the influence of the pandemic, learning has received a whole new measure. Schools and colleges, and even tutors preferred the online mode of learning made possible through apps like Zoom or Google Meet.
People have become accustomed to the same and hence, you can use this opportunity to encourage your employee volunteers to tutor low-income, underprivileged children. Pick the field you’re good at and spread the word online.
Awareness on Fundraising
Picking good causes to raise various types of money is one of the most important ways to motivate employees to give back to the community. There are a lot of such causes which require a lot of attention and word-spread due to shortage of funds. You can suggest your team to help promote the cause on online platforms such as social media, fundraising websites, and a lot more. With multiple people working on this, the online reach can be huge.
Conduct online workshops
Use your skills and conduct online workshops under no cost. Teammates working on similar fields (For example: Content Marketing and SEO) can conduct team workshops (for example: How to write an article and make it rank on Google?).
This improves employee engagement as employees spend more time preparing this workshop together and also helps the audience learn and understand through your course.
Offer your service to non-profit organizations
Non-profits often face lack of resources due to shortage of funds. Hence, you and your team can volunteer to offer skill-based services for no charges.
It can be writing, designing, technical, PR, etc. Offering them your skills is a great way to improve team bonding and help the organization achieve their goals.
Conduct a charity event
Conduct a team-building charity event where employee engagement and corporate volunteering program goes perfectly hand-in-hand. While the event resolves the engagement issues, people join in for a cause. These are one of the most common forms of team-building activities in North America.
Curate positive events and spread the word
Studies show that approximately 90% of all media news is negative. Having to witness such news everyday, this can take a toll on the readers’ minds.
Hence, in the current scenario, it is imperative to talk about anything good happening around the world. You and your team can put up a page where you talk about all positive events happening around the world. (Tip: Call it the Happy Hour) And there, this will be people’s daily boost to a good start.
FAQ
What is an employee volunteering program?
An employee volunteering program is created by the organization itself. Here it encourages employees to participate in volunteering activities, do something good for the community and society as a whole. It is also used as a form of team building and employee engagement activity as people work on these tasks in teams.
How do you implement an employee volunteer program?
- Create an employee volunteering policy
- Have sessions and explain the importance of this program to your employees
- If you’re choosing the volunteering activity yourself, you have to analyze some demographics. Like location, age, interests, skills, etc. and accordingly decide
- Another alternative is to let employees choose their teams and activities
How do companies encourage their employees to volunteer their time?
It is better to conduct sessions to encourage employees to volunteer in these particular activities. Explain to them the depth of why they should do these activities and offer their time on it.
Also ensure volunteering time-offs to employees such that they don’t hesitate giving extra efforts for this.
What are the benefits of employee volunteering programs?
Volunteering helps in encouraging and motivating employees to help the society and understand the value of kindness. This also helps in the growth of the organization as a whole and engages team-bonding.
Another form of effective employee engagement solution is Trivia, a 1 stop solution to team-building, healthy competition, and fun activities
