It is vital that the British Year of the Volunteer 2005, announced by the Chancellor in this year’s budget, can open doors more widely to encouraging people to give time to their communities, including employees from the corporate sector.
The year should be an opportunity to increase the number of challenging opportunities to involve citizens in schools, prisons and hospitals. It should also provide a platform for the corporate sector to see for itself the benefits that employee volunteering can have on staff development and company well-being.
We know that companies such as Nike, npower, Barclays and Deutsche Bank report enormous benefits from enabling their staff to volunteer. There’s much more to be gained from spending a lunch hour in a school improving a child’s reading age a year in a term, as my son does in the City, than being sent by a company to fire paint balls at each other as part of so-called team-building exercises. Indeed, The Royal Bank of Scotland discovered that volunteer involvement led to a significant drop in staff turnover.
CSV, the UK’s largest volunteering and training organisation, offers its expertise to help companies transform their investment in an employee volunteering programme into an investment in their companies. Many of the benefits were highlighted recently by Stephen Timms, Minister for Corporate Social Responsibility, who called for more companies to get involved in volunteering at a gathering hosted by CSV and The Guardian. He said: “Businesses have a lot to gain through stronger relationships with the community and voluntary groups; a better reputation, higher local profile, greater staff motivation, and the development of new skills and a fresh perspective on the part of the volunteer.”
Some teach football, others give manicures to cancer patients or help refugees settle in new communities.
Research has shown that two in three business leaders across Europe believe that responsible business practice can promote innovation within their organisation by increasing learning from outside, and promoting a broader perspective within the organisation. And innovation is key to success in the contemporary economy.
Over 10,000 employee volunteers took past in the last CSV Make a Difference Day supported by Barclays and held annually in the last week of October. Now the single largest day of volunteering in the UK, it provides the ideal platform for team tasks. Fifty volunteers from Norwich Union teamed up to transform a garden and play area at a children’s home in Kings Lynn. A further forty employees from Allied Domecq in Bristol undertook tasks that included renovating a dining room for brain injured children in Bridgwater.
David Frost, Director-General of the British Chambers of Commerce is backing the cause: “Small businesses have a strong record of contributing to their local communities. CSV Make a Difference Day is a great opportunity for businesses to get involved in their local communities, enabling staff to give back to the community and also develop communication and leadership skills.”
If there are members of the corporate community not yet involved with employee volunteering then I’d say, ‘try it out’.
COMMENTS