{"id":39875,"date":"2012-03-20T12:00:42","date_gmt":"2012-03-20T12:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.corporate-eye.com\/blog\/?p=39875"},"modified":"2012-06-08T23:56:14","modified_gmt":"2012-06-08T22:56:14","slug":"tips-corporate-volunteering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.corporate-eye.com\/main\/tips-corporate-volunteering\/","title":{"rendered":"Eight Tips For Corporate Volunteering"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It’s almost certain that you’ve never heard of the the Global Corporate Volunteer Council<\/a> (GCVC).\u00a0 Created by the International Association for Volunteer Effort, its founding members include Citi Bank, Disney, Levi Strauss and Samsung.<\/p>\n

Corporate volunteering is nothing new: a business releases its employees from their day job to allow them to engage with the civil society within which the company exists. How long the release is for varies between a day a month and a week a year.\u00a0 Sometimes the employee receives a stipend from their employer, sometimes they don’t.<\/p>\n

International corporate volunteering (ICV) is much the same beast but on a bigger scale.\u00a0 Businesses place their employees on a volunteer basis in international projects where their skills can contribute to the achievement of a defined goal.\u00a0 Sometimes these can take months to achieve, sometimes shorter.<\/p>\n

Back in June 2011 GCVC published a final report<\/a> into the international state of ICV, and it makes interesting reading.\u00a0 Part of the report is “Seven Learnings” which, although aimed specifically at ICV, are almost equally applicable to any company of any size running a volunteer programme.<\/p>\n

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Seven Tips for Corporate Volunteering<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/span>The seven “learnings” are as follows.\u00a0 Yes I promised you eight tips, and the eighth is my own addition at the end.<\/p>\n

1) Inspiration is better than Best<\/strong>.\u00a0 Adopt “inspiring practices” not “best practice”.\u00a0 “Best Practice” is a matter of perspective, which can change from company to company let alone industry to industry or country to country. \u00a0 It’s far better to inspire a community, not impose the strictures of the business world<\/p>\n

2) Use your employees strategically<\/strong>. There’s no sense in using an accountant to set up an IT network, or a techie to try and understand the myriad paths of corporate law.\u00a0 Play to your employees strengths and interests, leverage them as assets<\/p>\n

3) Partner with NGOs<\/strong>.\u00a0 This almost seems like a no-brainer but it’s a real measure of a corporation’s motivation for engaging with civil society.\u00a0 NGOs will know how best to use a company’s personnel assets on the ground .. you need to partner with them in order to get the maximum from your investment<\/p>\n

4) Celebrate the difference.<\/strong>\u00a0 There is no empirical solution which makes a successful business or a successful NGO.\u00a0 Just because a corporation, commercial or otherwise, organises\u00a0 itself differently to you doesn’t make it “wrong”.\u00a0 Embrace that difference and above all look to learn from the partnership<\/p>\n

5) Measurement and evaluation.<\/strong> Understand and accept that the purpose of corporate volunteering is not to bring commercial gain or profit to your company or your partnering NGOs; the goal can be far more simple: help local youths to form a rock band, clear the local river of choking reeds; the greatest evaluation of corporate volunteering is that the individual’s efforts have contributed to the community<\/p>\n

6) Technology<\/strong>: This is perhaps the greatest leverage companies can bring to bear yet it’s probably also the most underused; for example, a business will plan to have enough bandwidth to cope with peak demand, yet surely it can give some of that bandwidth to an NGO when traffic is slack? Co-hosting, in other words.<\/p>\n

7) Skills based volunteering:<\/strong> On the face of it this seems wonderful: a business volunteers an employee to work on a NFP project and gain a little bit of the reflected glory; but I don’t like it, and it leads me to ask one simple question…<\/p>\n

What’s wrong with <\/strong>Corporate Volunteering<\/strong>?<\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/span>I think it’s fair to say I’m sceptical of all corporate volunteer programmes in any shape or form.\u00a0 This is because there is an implied assumption by a business that it can treat an employee, their interests and skills, as an asset to be deployed as best they see fit.<\/p>\n

As an extreme example, I doubt any company would release its employees to work for volunteer movements such as Occupy Wall Street or Anonymous.<\/p>\n

Businesses need to realise that their employees often have opinions and goals which are not aligned to the corporate line.\u00a0 At present, work consumes most of an adult’s working life and allows little space for the individual’s engagement in civil society<\/p>\n

Corporate volunteering today doesn’t really allow a person to express their individuality\u00a0 … rather it subsumes that individuality into the commercial ambitions of the\u00a0 corporate whole.<\/p>\n

To me, that seems to work against and not for civil society.\u00a0 This is why I’m much more in favour of a reduction in working hours across the board, as promoted by the Rethink Work project<\/a> I’m involved in.<\/p>\n

This advocates that working hours should be cut across the board. One figure proposed by the New Economics Foundation<\/a> is 21 hours \/ week.\u00a0 This is not what Rethink Work proposes, but it’s as a good figure to toss around as any.<\/p>\n

On the face of it this may seem like a ridiculous curtailment of employment and business, but there is very strong evidence in favour of such a cut.\u00a0 This includes:<\/p>\n