Corporate Volunteering: Let’s Have Meaningful Engagement
By Chris Jarvis, Senior Partner, Business Development, Realized Worth
Corporate volunteering has the potential to engage employees; yet most programs struggle to build basic awareness and participation, let alone create meaningful engagement. Part of the problem is that management too often expects employees to do the legwork of strategic initiatives, rather than including them in the decision-making around societal change. And that misses the point of engagement.
Impact is not the same as engagement
Despite the popularity of programmatic elements like skills-based or pro bono volunteering, these expressions of community involvement cannot produce meaningful engagement on their own. Even much vaunted strategic methodologies such as shared value struggle to generate meaningful engagement for employees.
The numbers don’t lie. Despite the incredible growth and resourcing of corporate volunteering strategies over the past three years, participation rates are flat. Internal awareness among employees hasn’t budged. Despite all the new technology to support giving and volunteering, the actual use of these platforms is only marginally better than it was on outdated technology. And practitioners, for the most part, continue to see the same group of employees volunteering over and over again.
Here’s why: we’re confusing efficacy with engagement.
What (or who) is the point?
New corporate citizenship strategies typically promise incredible and laudable capacity for beneficial change. These strategies tend to follow a “command and control” management model based on an approach called “deliberate” strategy as championed by management thought leaders like Michael Porter. This deliberate approach outlines management’s vision and mission that is then broadly communicated to the actors (employees) responsible for its successful execution. In this approach, efficacy is the highest determining principle driving all other principles and means of execution.
Develop the plan. Communicate the plan. Execute. Assess and repeat.
The problem with this approach is that the primary actors—the employees—are viewed as a means to an end and are not necessarily expected to be affected by the change process itself. Employees are a means to an end, but not the end itself, which of course makes perfect sense. It is the entire premise of the industrial revolution where we learned that anyone can be taught a skill, join an assembly line and work with thousands of other employees to produce amazing results. But no single employee, beyond the most senior leaders, need ever understand the process. Show up, do your job, and good things will happen.
That is efficacy. It is not meaningful engagement.
Employees are the point
Meaningful engagement can have multiple definitions depending on the context. Here, we are talking about the employee’s sense of connection to the organization’s goals and objectives and the correlating amount of enthusiasm and positive action they are willing to contribute to the shared outcomes.
In order to achieve meaningful engagement, employees must be invited into the change process itself. The strategic application of resources and activities to produce a change in the world around us does not automatically mean everyone understands or cares about the end result.
In order to achieve meaningful engagement in corporate volunteering, CSR, or any other corporate citizenship activity, people must be invited into a transformative learning experience. When corporate volunteering goes beyond transactional and is instead transformative, participants experience “a deep, structural shift in the basic premises of thought, feelings, and actions.” This shift of consciousness can “dramatically and irreversibly alter our way of being in the world.”
This piece was first published at Realized Worth.
About the author:
Chris Jarvis
Senior Partner, Business Development
Realized Worth
Chris Jarvis is a co-founder and Senior Partner of Realized Worth, a consulting firm focused on engaging employees in Corporate Citizenship programs. Widely known for his thought-leadership in employee volunteering, workplace giving and corporate social responsibility, Chris was asked by the United Nations Office of Partnerships to design and launch the first private sector led initiative to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through corporate volunteering. This project is now known as Impact2030. Chris serves as the Senior Content Advisor for Impact2030.
