Corporate volunteerism: Seeding a culture of social responsibility

Potential to bring about positive socio-economic change is huge.

With corporate philanthropy morphing into corporate social responsibility (CSR), experts today propound embedding CSR throughout all business operations of a company.

This holistic approach may well be the way to go, but CSR does need to be adaptive to the overall operating environment of each individual company.

In developing economies particularly, a key area within the holistic approach of embedding CSR that should be focused on is corporate volunteerism.

A number of excellent studies empirically elaborate the business case for corporate volunteerism. Benefits range from greater employee motivation to greater brand awareness; and from refining various employee skills like teamwork, problem-solving and so forth, to creating shared value in communities that as a consequence give a company competitive advantage.

Some well-known global companies have claimed positive benefits of employees volunteering for as little as a single working day in the year. It is not merely a question of more hours is equal to more impact.

What is more important is that corporate volunteerism first of all needs a strong buy-in from the volunteers themselves. An individual who puts in a day in the year is bound to be substantially less sensitive and hence less responsive to the issue at hand, than another individual who for example puts in 3 hours a week for say 3 whole months. The level of commitment, compassion and effort the volunteer will bring to an issue will be far higher if the volunteer is mentally and physically involved in it for a sustained period.

Though the primary purpose of employees’ remains contributing to the company’s productivity and profitability, I would argue that this is by no means compromised by an employee undertaking volunteer work on a regular basis for an extended period of time. Each company needs to explore and decide the optimum volunteer time it can allow its employees, but in my personal opinion, for most businesses allowing an employee 3 working hours a week volunteering time out of official work hours should really not be an issue.

The potential for corporate volunteerism to bring about substantial, systemic and positive socio-economic change is simply huge. For starters, the corporate volunteers bring a high level of dedication to the task, being in it in the first place by choice. Then, these change agents are quite well-equipped to handle the task at hand. Generally speaking their education level will be higher than the communities being helped, and their corporate training will have inculcated different skills in them that they bring to the task.

Corporate volunteerism programmes should thus be formulated after adequate research into all aspects of the subject, as applicable to each company. It is important to ensure that once launched, the programme is practical, efficient, sustainable and hopefully scalable also. Finally, as with any area of CSR, the volunteerism programme needs to be constantly monitored, reviewed and analyzed, and fine-tuned as it progresses.

The writer is CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER at ASIATIC PUBLIC RELATIONS NETWORK

Published in The Express Tribune, October 10^th, 2011.