In business, there are many ways to give back to the local community in which you work as well as to broader society overall. If you are like most corporations, you are looking for ways to incorporate volunteering and understand the way it benefits not only your employees but the organizations they support.
Read on to learn about this topic and why you should be investing in employee volunteering for a variety of reasons:
What is Employee Volunteering?
Before delving deeper into the topic of employee volunteering, it’s helpful to understand what it even means. Employee volunteering is also called corporate volunteering on occasion. It is a workplace-based initiative where employers encourage or support employees who volunteer for local charities or to help other good causes. Simply put, it is a way for companies to give back to their communities in a structured, company-supported way.
What Are The Benefits For Employers?
While it’s easy enough to guess the benefits derived by the charities and organizations such employee volunteering programs give said organizations, having an employee volunteer program or a corporate volunteering program is advantageous for you as an employer as well for the following reasons:
Higher Level of Employee Engagement
Let’s face it, we all want to feel like we are making a positive difference in our daily lives. Your employees are no exception. Through these programs, they will be able to give back with the support of your company behind them, which is a much more purposeful prospect than simply punching in and out at work. This will ensure your employees remain engaged with your brand and with the work they are doing for the community.
Assists in Employer Branding
Speaking of branding, having a volunteer program be an important part of your company ensures that your organization has a positive reputation, or is branded as caring and generous. This looks good from the outside and helps entice even more employees to come work for you who want to give back. This means employees will begin to want to come work for you because you give back, allowing them a chance to give back, helping your brand’s image overall in terms of employment and the broader community.
Contribution to the Community’s Well-being
Another benefit of employee volunteering is the fact that it helps the community. This means that the community overall remains healthier and thriving, which in turn will help all businesses succeed, not just your own.
Enhances Employee Skills and Personal Development
Your employees will become better people overall when they begin to give back to others. They might develop new skills as part of their volunteer efforts or simply gain some knowledge on an issue that they previously did not understand. Either way, it enhances your employees, making them better overall.
Increased Employee Satisfaction
Again, giving your employees something purposeful to do with their day can make them more satisfied overall. We all want to make a difference, and each person’s day should have a purpose. Employee volunteering can help fulfill employees.
Recruitment and Retention
Finding the right employees and then keeping them through retention is a big challenge in today’s ultra-competitive job market. You can set your company apart from others by offering employee volunteering programs that allow your employees a chance to give back and make a difference.
Attractive to Millennials and Gen-Z
Millennials and Gen-Z are highly interested in charitable giving, making a difference, and causes. They want to feel as if they are making a difference and this is even more important to many of them than how much money they make. Therefore, if you offer a great employee volunteering program, this will pique the interest of these generations more than other benefits.
What Are The Benefits For Employees?
Now that we have considered how employee volunteering can help a business overall and employers more specifically, it’s important to consider how it can help employees themselves. It is really a win-win situation because such programs have been proven to be beneficial not just for the employers or companies but for the employees and the communities overall. Here are just a few specific ways employees are benefited:
Gaining Skills
As touched on earlier, when volunteering, many times employees gain skills they did not previously have. For example, if they volunteer at a local food bank, they might learn how to prepare a certain dish by helping prepare the weekly meal.
Sense of Purpose
Feeling like one is making a difference in this world, even in some small way is so important. Thankfully, these types of volunteer programs can help give employees a sense of purpose they perhaps have never experienced before.
Improve Employee Mental Health
When employees feel as if they are truly making a difference and helping someone, making a positive change, this can improve their overall well-being and mental health. Poor mental health is such a problem in today’s over-stressed society that anything you can do to help improve your employees’ mental health overall should be considered.
Boosted Morale
Your employees will all feel better about themselves overall when they become part of a volunteer program. This will lead to a boosted morale overall, company-wide. This has been proven actually in a Volunteerism Survey by Deloitte that stated that 70% of those who responded said volunteer activities are more likely to boost employee morale, more so than even a company-sponsored happy hour.
Giving Back Does Good For All
Volunteerism in the workplace can have many positive effects on a company, its employees, and the cause or charity associated with the program. Therefore, incorporating such programs into your workplace is a great way to give back and improve your work environment as well. Giving back does good for all!
