Giving Thoughts

Corporate volunteering: what’s in it for employees?

By Barbara Scheck, Assistant Professor for Social Investment, University of Hamburg and Advisory Board Member, The Conference Board Initiative on Corporate Philanthropy

Corporate volunteering is seen as one of the most efficient corporate levers to tackle social challenges by combining a company’s professionalism and financial resources with its employees’ engagement. Having started in the early 90s, corporate volunteering nowadays can be found in more than 90 percent of Fortune Global 500 companies, each of which invests up to 1.3 million hours per annum.

Despite being such a widespread CSR strategy, research into corporate volunteering remains rather underdeveloped. In particular, there is little empirical information on the effects of these programs on participating employees, their employers, and nonprofits. In this context, we believe the effects of corporate volunteering can be two-fold.

The primary effect is to generate social impact, (i.e. a positive effect on the beneficiaries of volunteering). Social impact assessment can be difficult as it lacks a cohesive and universal set of metrics allowing benchmarking across industries. Initiatives like the Global Reporting Initiative, IRIS or the Social Reporting Standard have been pioneers in this field, shedding light on how to assess impact transparently and accountably. But the standardization process is not complete.

The second effect relates to the potential business benefits of corporate volunteering for companies (e.g. reputation, employee satisfaction). Data in this area consists so far predominantly of practical anecdotes rather than in-depth academic research.

A comprehensive analysis of employee involvement in corporate volunteering

For all of these reasons, our research team in Europe has launched a study focusing on the benefits that companies experience as a result of corporate volunteering. We are concentrating specifically on participating employees. The chosen approach aims to develop a comprehensive model that, for the first time, analyzes the entire employee involvement process. This will help us understand not only how employees benefit from their corporate volunteering experiences, but also which components cause and influence those effects.

The sample consists of roughly 40 companies based in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, with a total of around 700,000 employees. Around 2,100 of these employees participate in corporate volunteering programs, spending between two hours and ten days per year in the respective programs. In total, more than 600 corporate volunteers have participated in this survey. We only addressed corporate volunteering programs that concentrate on working with children and teenagers, since this represents a major field of corporate volunteering involvement in Europe. The study focused on two main topics: Motives of participation and perceived effects of participation.

Preliminary results reveal interesting insights. Regarding motives of participation, corporate volunteers do not get involved in the program for career-enhancing reasons, but mainly to have an enriching personal experience while expressing their values by helping the young people they work with. This finding stresses the similarity to private volunteers who hold congruent expectations.

Regarding the effects that volunteers experience through participation, our study investigates whether corporate volunteers associate these effects with the project (or the independent nonprofits with whom they volunteer), or with their employing firms.

Here, the results are rather surprising. Overall, we find spill-over effects from the project to the company level. Specifically, we could determine positive effects on employees’ job satisfaction, organizational commitment and competencies, but no effects on the internal working relationships (collegiality) between participating corporate volunteers. Even though effects remain to some degree on the corporate volunteering-project level and thus weaken in transition to the company level, effects on the business are still statistically significant.

A business case for employee volunteering

Taking these results into consideration, companies can actually demonstrate a business case when offering corporate volunteering activities to their workforce. In particular, corporate volunteering programs lead to more satisfied, skilled and committed employees. This results in a win-win situation for companies and nonprofit organizations alike.

In the case of nonprofits, which often depend heavily on voluntary support, this finding can lead to increased support from for-profit companies in the form of money, means, low-cost or free skilled human resources, professional networks, fresh perspectives and media support. In addition, the findings provide nonprofits with detailed information on why corporate volunteers engage, which fosters sustainable participation rates and achieves a satisfying experience overall for all involved parties, resulting in efficient and long-term partnerships.

About the author:

Prof. Dr. Barbara Scheck has been Assistant Professor for Social Investment at the University of Hamburg since 2012. Her research focuses on the financing of social enterprises, impact and mission-related investing and impact measurement.