Corporate giving and volunteer initiatives are kind of like unlimited vacation policies—they sound enticing, but most people don’t take advantage of them. Here’s how we can change that.
Companies with paid volunteer time off struggle with underutilization: no one is actually taking time off to volunteer.
Similarly, employers that offer “dollars for doers” or corporate matching programs also report less than stellar participation. Many companies have tried to make it easier to donate at work, offering things like payroll deductions for donations, yet they continue to struggle with widespread adoption.
There is a mystery here: Research shows that employees consistently ask for opportunities to give back, yet they are not taking advantage of donation and volunteer opportunities when offered. So what is going on?
Background: Explaining the employee adoption gap in corporate giving activities
Corporate giving programs—often part of broader Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and employee engagement strategies—are designed to benefit the company in a way that maximizes impact and reduces expense. While almost all companies intuitively believe that CSR is good for the business, calculating the ROI of these programs is incredibly challenging. As a result, companies tend to implement programs in ways that are the easiest and most economical to manage and measure, thereby entrenching CSR as a centralized function with very limited budget.
The mistaken belief that companies have is that people will volunteer and donate when given the opportunity, so the company should standardize the process for volunteering and donating as much as possible to cut costs and offer programs that are easiest to manage. But this does not work. Ask CSR professionals what the hardest part of their job is, and they will tell you it’s trying to convince enough people to participate in their programs, and then share stories and metrics. This is because companies think that all giving activities are equal, so the easier it is to offer any opportunity, the better—and this is exactly why it’s not working.
This is a classic example of the tension between employees and employers: Employees donate for deeply personal, often subconscious, reasons. On the other side, their employers are likely participating for largely commercial reasons. Beyond donations, people also give back through volunteering, and their motivations for giving their time are often more complex than donating dollars, involving deep social ties and personal relationships. Employers partially recognize this and attempt to use volunteering as a tool to generating happier and healthier employees. However, companies miss the boat by trying to capture the benefits of volunteering without understanding why their employees might actually want to volunteer on behalf of their company in the first place.
The tension behind employer and employee giving is further exaggerated by a company’s own processes. Because a company can only benefit from CSR if it can measure and report on its and its employees’ giving activities, it has even more incentives to standardize giving. This is done in a variety of ways, including trying to run more “efficient” day of giving campaigns, implementing technology platforms that limit volunteering and donations to pre-vetted causes, or launching incentive programs that give “dollars to doers” if done with verified organizations. However, the more a company standardizes its giving, the less giving occurs.
The Challenge: Shifting from short-term measurement to long-term investing
“We are finding out quite rapidly that to be successful long term we have to ask: what do we actually give to society to make it better? We’ve made it clear to the organization that it’s our business model, starting from the top.”
—Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever
Corporate giving programs suffer from the same problems that affect their nonprofit partners: not understanding their “customers” and measuring the wrong thing on account of short-term thinking. The reality is that the benefits of CSR are recognized in the long-term, yet markets, corporate boards, and executives mandate short-term evaluation.
In lieu of measuring the true, long-terms benefits of these programs, CSR leaders are instead forced to measure things like the amount of money donated and the number of hours volunteered, the same forces that doom companies by forcing them to focus too much on short-term earnings. In fact, measurement is such a critical part of CSR that it prohibits its practitioners from actually making an impact. Nonprofits and corporations frequently complain that reporting on dollars and hours is so challenging, most don’t do it, or spend most of their time trying to get to accurate numbers instead of creating an impact. According to research from McKinsey: “Traditional corporate social responsibility is failing to deliver, for both companies and society. Executives need a new approach to engaging the external environment.”
The Opportunity: Maximizing engagement by designing giving programs that focus on employee preferences
Study after study show that CSR is good for the bottom line, has a material impact, and that employee giving programs can create . In fact, more CEOs than ever before have reported that they will be increasing CSR investments in the coming year. As such, programs should be designed to maximize engagement, not to simplify reporting and management. A report from Deloitte’s monitor group highlights that doing so can engage and develop your purpose-driven professionals.
Simply put, when employees give, and truly feel empowered to give by their company, they build loyalty and engagement with their company. The more employees who give, and the more that each employee gives, the better for the world and for the bottom line.
This is why we see rapid adoption of programs that empower employees to give the way they want to give.
Focus on empowering employees
As research shows, employees that give more while being supported by their company become more engaged and more loyal. Simply put, employees are more likely to give even more when they decide how and when their time and dollars are given. As such, if companies want to engage their employees with giving campaigns, the best thing to do is let employees decide where they volunteer and where they give their money.
Companies can take it a step farther to make it a cultural approach by rewarding time off to actually engage in these causes. Instead of viewing time spent on social causes as time of work, companies—and the managers within—should recognize that giving activities are powerful business tools to increase engagement, provide stretch learning experiences, develop leadership skills, improve products, develop partnerships, and foster innovation. Simply put, managers should proactively encourage their employees to spend time on social good activities in the same way they might encourage their team to go to a conference, take an online course, or participate in training.
This really is a win-win.
Not only does a human centered design approach to giving increase engagement and bottom-line benefits, but it’s also easier to manage, requiring less centralized program management when the right tools and processes are used.
This article was taken from here.