Employee volunteering experts Works4U have produced a free guide for businesses to help them establish and develop successful impactful volunteering programmes within their organisation.
Not-for-profit social enterprise Works4U was founded in 2009 and they have helped hundreds of businesses with their corporate volunteering programmes. If you are looking to develop your employee volunteering programme and want to learn from the experience of others, then this simple and practical guide will help you be successful and avoid common mistakes.
The guide of expert tips is a must for anyone involved in an employee volunteering programme. Works4U’s recommendations will help save you money, better engage your staff and develop your business.
An effective employee volunteering programme will help you demonstrate your CSR and ESG credentials as well as many other business benefits.
Here is a sneak preview of the guide that gives details of 9 expert tips to help employee volunteering professionals:
1. Culture first, technology second – The number one reason that employee volunteering programmes get limited traction or fail completely is due to a technology first or technology led solution.
2. Walk before you can run – The second most common reason employee volunteering programmes struggle to get off the ground, is when companies get too ambitious in the early development.
3. Quality over quantity – With employee volunteering programmes, measuring volunteer hours is vanity, volunteering culture is sanity and impact is king.
4. Engaging with community organisations – An area that often causes issues for companies is engaging with charities and community groups.
5. Recognition of volunteers – It is standard volunteer management best practice to recognise the work and contribution of volunteers. However, many businesses fail to do this.
6. Don’t forget the business reasons for having an employee volunteering programme – If a business is implementing an employee volunteering programme as a ‘tick box exercise’ or views it as a ‘nice to have’ then its success and impact will be limited. Employees will realise pretty quickly if a business does not really have its heart in such activity.
7. The right personnel – many organisations fall down in this area as either they have not recognised their strengths and weaknesses or their set up is not right.
8. Keeping volunteering voluntary – Another area that companies fall foul of is to make participating in volunteering events mandatory or obligatory.
9. Don’t deviate – Even if you know all the good practice in delivering successful employee volunteering programmes, sometimes it can be difficult to resist the influences and pressures from both within and external to the business that may cause your programme to falter.
To download a copy of the full FREE guide, go to Works4U’s webpage.
Works4U are able to offer this highly valuable guide for free as part of their social mission to lead the development of impactful employee volunteering in the UK. Works4U are also launching the world’s first employee volunteering quality standard (EVA): https://www.evaqualitystandard.com/
Dominic Pinkney's World of Volunteering 