Carefully planned schemes can help employees build skills
Volunteering schemes can have business benefits when they are linked to staff development, a report from the CIPD has found.
The report, ‘Volunteering to learn: Employee development though community action’, studied a number of companies who encourage employee volunteering. The findings revealed an overwhelming link between volunteering and staff development. Respondents in the study saw their employees developing team building, workload management and communication skills.
Employers involved with the study shared their experiences at the report’s launch event, hosted by PwC. Kate van der Plank, head of UK community action at National Grid, described how her firm developed a high-value skills based volunteering programme, including a tailored volunteering programme for their new starters. The initiatives improved engagement among volunteers. “In our annual company survey, we compared the engagement scores of volunteers to those for the overall company,” van der Plank explained. “Volunteers were way ahead on all questions relating to engagement.”
Discussing PwC’s programme, Stephen Hogan, senior manager, corporate sustainability, said they surveyed volunteers, both before and after they took part in volunteering, on four areas; skills, engagement, networking and awareness. “The results were really interesting. In those four areas, they scored themselves higher,” he said. “Within areas like skills, often it’s softer skills where people say they have developed.”
Hogan noted that 75 per cent of the volunteers said that volunteering had an impact on the way they worked.
Ruth Stuart, learning and development research adviser at the CIPD, said: “It’s fantastic to see such a big increase in the number of employers advocating volunteering opportunities to their employees. We welcome the trend for corporate social responsibility (CSR), HR and L&D teams to work together on this. But, it’s also clear that more needs to be done, not just to maximise the developmental opportunities that volunteering offers employees, but also to ensure that what an organisation does within its CSR activity is connected to a more strategic HR and L&D agenda around growing your own workforce and building talent pipelines.”
Van der Plank added: “Sharing our business and professional skills enables charity and community organisations to access expertise they may otherwise have to pay for, and helps them become more commercial in the way they operate, making them more sustainable. At the same time, we benefit from rich and engaging learning experiences in skills areas relevant to our business.”