Workplace Volunteering

A core goal of all leaders of volunteers is to ensure that volunteers have a great experience. If you are directly managing the volunteers yourself, that goal can be structured and achievable. But in larger organisations, where the responsibility for managing and supporting volunteers is delegated to specific departments, ensuring a consistent volunteer experience can be more difficult. One way to address this is to provide training to non-volunteer engagement colleagues who are supervising volunteers.  

This Training Designs provides practical training exercises to equip non-volunteer staff with the knowledge and skills needed to help create great volunteer experiences. Developed by the head of volunteering development at The Myton Hospices, Warwick, Warwickshire, these exercises have been used successfully to help staff gain a better understanding of volunteering, provide clarity around staff roles and responsibilities for supervising volunteers, and give ideas to manage volunteers well. The exercises are designed to be fun, generate discussion, share best practices, and be memorable. These exercises have worked for many leaders of volunteers - and they can work for you, too.

This past August 2018, Starbucks, the coffee giant, and the non-profit organization Points of Light launched a six-month pilot program that allows Starbucks employees to get their full pay check while volunteering at selected non-profits for half the work week. Before long, the Internet and Volunteer Program Manager list serves were buzzing about a topic that routinely rears its head in volunteer management circles. Namely, do Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs create positive, beneficial experiences for volunteers, or is paying someone to volunteer simply absurd?

In this Voices, author Allyson Drinnon hears from people on both sides of this debate, ranging from a volunteer program manager to a corporate representative familiar with the concept. That Starbucks’ Salted Caramel Mocha Frappucinno^® may never taste the same again.

What can an organization learn by examining why some people choose not to volunteer? In this issue’s Research to Practice, Laurie Mook reviews an article by researchers from Australia and the Netherlands that focuses our attention on these non-volunteers.

While we know a lot about volunteers, their motivations, and issues related to volunteer management, we know far less about non-volunteers. Using the concept of ‘volunteerability’ – defined as an "individual’s ability to overcome related obstacles and volunteer, based on their willingness, capability, and availability" (Haski-Leventhal et al., 2017, 2) – the authors in this study reviewed literature, held focus groups, and conducted a survey to understand the barriers that non-volunteers face in their willingness, capability, and availability to volunteer.

Although the article is positioned in terms of informing social policy, the findings are also useful at the organization level. Understanding the non-volunteer perspective can be helpful in attracting and retaining new volunteers to your organization. 

Why do volunteers break the rules? This Research to Practice reviews an ethnographic study of an animal shelter where disruptive behavior by volunteers was a regular occurrence. This disruptive behavior was defined as “any behavior that either explicitly violated a rule or was identified by more than one staff member as disruptive” (Jacobs, 2017, 31). Researcher Molly Jacobs volunteered four days a week for a year at the shelter, keeping extensive notes of her observations and interactions. She also interviewed paid and unpaid workers. In her analysis, Jacobs was able to identify different ‘rule breaking’ categories and analyze why this occurred.

This Research to Practice review of this study provides an opportunity to think about these types of disruptions in your own volunteer context, and perhaps determine different ways to handle them.

It’s not very likely that the barrista serving your morning latte, the receptionist checking you into your vacation hotel, or the bank manager deciding whether to approve your home renovation loan are thinking about volunteering as they go about their daily work. But their corporate employers back at headquarters might be doing just that – especially if they are one of the major global conglomerates whose products or services are prominent in shopping malls and main streets all around the world. Many of these global mega-companies coordinate volunteering by their staff as one practical way to help the communities where they do business.

Corporate employee volunteering is, of course, nothing new to organisations involving volunteers. But in this Along the Web, we penetrate the glossy Web sites of various global corporations to see what they reveal about their volunteer or service programmes. Even if the information is often hidden away and sometimes not very easy to access through page links, such Web pages can be a useful first source of information to organisations considering recruiting new volunteers from major employers worldwide. As we explore, we see how some corporations measure their programme’s social and environmental impacts; how others link volunteering to their Corporate Social Responsibility or Global Impact policies and to business goals; and how some connect their financial donations, ‘in kind’ giving, and volunteering activities. We also consider whether improving clarity and transparency would make some corporations’ Web sites more useful to recruiters seeking workplace volunteers. 

 

More and more, companies want to engage their communities through employee volunteering programs. For most businesses, this means calling a nonprofit and scheduling an activity. The nonprofits that can readily design and host successful employee volunteering events will find themselves critical and necessary assets in what has quickly become a key business strategy. Understanding why employee volunteering is important to companies is key to creating a good partnership. In this article, author Chris Jarvis provides some insights into what companies want from employee volunteering programs, and how nonprofits can position themselves as an indispensable corporate partner.

One of the fastest growing and most significant new ways of volunteering in the past 20 years has been volunteering through one’s workplace. Major corporations have created extensive programs to encourage and enable their employees to volunteer and this form of business social responsibility is now expanding to small businesses and government agencies. Oddly enough, the nonprofit community seems to be the only sector lagging behind in assisting its employees to volunteer in their communities. 

In this Along the Web, we’ll organize workplace volunteering topics into three categories:

• Volunteering by employees of large corporations
• Volunteering by employees other than in large corporations
• Sample materials regarding employee volunteering
  To read the full article

  BECOME A MEMBER

  LOG IN
  • Read more about Volunteering Through the Workplace