Works4U Wins International Award for Leading Employee Volunteering in UK

I’m quite cynical about awards and believe, mostly, they are BS. However, they can be glorious and helpful BS.

I run Works4U, a not-for-profit social enterprise specialising in employee volunteering, and we were invited to apply for the Wealth & Finance International Management Consulting Awards 2023. Normally it would have been a quick delete of such an email, but we have been working so hard at Works4U this past year to expand our field of work from delivery of impactful corporate volunteering to actually trying to lead and develop employee volunteering across the UK.

So, I decided I would take the time to apply and explain the work we have done with very little resources:

(i) Set up and run a national ESV network for voluntary and community sector organisations to share experiences, information and produce useful tools and resources. These help to not just sustain these services across the UK but also to develop good practice of how they are carried out.

(ii) Produce national research and analysis. We carried out a UK survey of employers and will release findings next month and last month we published the ‘Monetary value of charity trustees‘ report which highlights the importance of this essential volunteer role and will encourage business employees to consider it.

(iii) Produce resources for businesses to develop employee volunteering. Earlier in the year we produced and published the ‘9 Expert Tips for Developing an Employee Volunteering Programme‘. This is a free guide for businesses to help them avoid the common mistakes and pitfall.

(iv) Introduce two brand new quality standards. One has been launched, Lead Volunteering Organisations(LVO) which is a quality standard aimed at volunteer infrastructure organisations. The second which will launch soon, is the world’s first quality standard for employee volunteering, called Employee Volunteering Accreditation (EVA), which will enable businesses to have an independent stamp of approval to show off to their staff, potential staff, clients, investors, suppliers, partners and stakeholders that they a good business who do good things.

As I wrote the application, I realised that we actually had done and were still doing a lot! Week to week you tend to notice more the lack of progress you make rather than the actual progress achieved, so it was almost cathartic to stop and write about all that we had done.

Then I completely forgot about the award application.

Then we won! Then we celebrated.

As I wrote the media release I had the same feeling of being super proud of the work we have done, as a small team with little resources and time, to progress as far as we have. The award may not mean much to anyone else and I suspect they may have invented a category just for us, but I will take it as it is recognition for all we have done this past year.

So, I still think awards are BS, but they can be good BS.

I want also to say a huge and special thank you to my colleague Martyna who has worked so hard this year to achieve what we have done.