It’s an initiative to bring IBM closer to the communities where we do business and to reward and celebrate the volunteer efforts of our employees. We’ve created a space on the IBM intranet with information, training and resources staff can use in local volunteering. These include presentations and activities, such as a science toolkit and a change management toolkit, for taking into schools.
Why ‘On Demand’?
We were looking to develop a new initiative that would align community engagement with our global business, ‘on demand’. The idea of ‘on demand’ is that a company or institution can provide products & services, to customers – on demand. We wanted to take this approach and shared values to our community programme. With the website, our volunteers around the world can pick up resources to suit their workstyles and lifestyles. It’s about making volunteering part of every day living. Other offerings are a technology planning tool for not-for profits and web adaptation technology to help elderly and disabled people use the Internet more easily.
Why make it global?
Because we’re a global company. Over the last ten years we’ve been developing community programmes that address global societal issues, mostly education-related. Our [I]Kidsmart programme, for example, focuses on early learning education – an issue that concerns governments all around the world. Issues like early learning and science play out the same in China, just as they do in France or Brazil. By packaging these together into a global initiative, our volunteers can together deliver a much more significant impact.
There’s an internal benefit for IBM too. Any global organisation with a variety of age groups and diverse backgrounds needs to work hard to make people feel engaged. Volunteering is superb way of recognising that our employees are not just one number among many, but an individual who has particular talents and interests.
Did you develop it globally too?
Yes. And this was a new approach for us. Rather than develop the programme through corporate centre and then roll it out locally, which would take a couple of years, we engaged all IBM’s regions from the start. This meant lots of sub-groups and teams working on specific aspects of the project.
The result, though, was that we went from standstill to completion in six months. We now have a set of 100 tools, all of which are culturally appropriate for our global team. Most of these are translated into a number of languages so employees can use them whether it’s in a school in China or in North America.
What else makes On Demand a global first?
As far as we’re aware, this is the first time any company has opened up a global volunteering programme to its retired employees around the world. Retirees as you’d expect are often very active in their local communities. They welcome the opportunity to re-engage with IBM and to have access to our volunteering resources, which they can access through the internet. By promoting volunteering in the workplace, we hope that people will continue to volunteer into retirement.
How-s it going?
It’s going really well. We-re growing our numbers on an incremental basis each month. Globally, we now have 17,000 participants. In the UK, we’ve achieved 900 registrations to date, who have collectively achieved 40,000 hours of volunteering already.
Manager of corporate community relations IBM Europe, Middle East, Africa, Celia joined IBM in 1995 to implement a new pan-European strategy for community involvement. She currently manages programmes across more than 25 countries which focus on how Information Technology can help solve social issues, particularly in education. IBM’s portfolio of education programmes include: Reinventing Education, which builds teacher skills; TryScience.org, a new internet-based learning resource for science; and KidSmart early learning programme.
Before joining IBM, Celia was deputy chief executive at Action Resource Centre, a UK agency specialising in business involvement in the community. Prior to that, she held a number of roles related to social policy, such as preventative services.
email: [email]celia_moore@uk.ibm.com[/email]
web: [url]www.ibm.com/ibm/ibmgives[/url][/I]
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