Team-building is a great reason to organize volunteer events at your business. Employees who volunteer together have the opportunity to form closer bonds. And, at larger companies, a corporate volunteer event might be an employee’s first interaction with a co-worker from a different team or department.
However, that’s only part of the equation. Employee volunteering brings a variety of benefits to businesses and nonprofits alike, making it imperative that businesses prioritize creating corporate volunteering programs and offering different opportunities to their employees.
To help you understand how employee volunteering can be more than team building, we’ll cover its benefits for corporations and nonprofits. Then, we’ll dive into a few tips for encouraging your employees to volunteer.
Volunteering is a great way for businesses and corporations to facilitate team building between their employees. It’s a chance for them to interact with one another in a more genuine setting. However, that’s not the only benefit that employee volunteering has for corporations.
A few other benefits include:
Aside from all these other benefits, it just feels good to give back to your community! Your employees will appreciate the chance to volunteer—as long as you offer a variety of options that suit their needs. Not everyone enjoys volunteering in the exact same way, which is why it’s important to create a program with specialized opportunities in addition to a few large-scale volunteer team-building events. With a variety of volunteer initiatives, employees will be able to apply their unique passions and skills to make a difference in the community.
When considering employee volunteering, it’s important to consider the perspective of the other side. There’s no question that nonprofits benefit from employee volunteerism, but to create an effective program, you should know the details of how volunteerism helps them.
A few benefits that nonprofits receive from employee volunteering include:
When you consider these benefits, you can create more impactful volunteer programs for local nonprofits. For example, large-scale group volunteer events aren’t always the best way to serve nonprofit needs. Some nonprofits may feel obligated to accept help and may end up creating events that fit the company’s needs, but not their own.
On the other hand, Double the Donation recommends volunteer grant programs, which encourage volunteerism in a more flexible manner. In these programs, corporations will donate to a nonprofit after an employee volunteers there for a set amount of hours. For example, you could choose to donate $100 every time an employee volunteers for 25 hours. That way, your employees will volunteer in a way that’s beneficial to the nonprofit, and you’ll follow that up with monetary support.
Now that you know the benefits of employee volunteering for both businesses and nonprofits, the next step is to encourage employees to volunteer so that you and your nonprofit partners can reap these benefits.
We’ve already touched on the biggest suggestion, which is to offer multiple options to empower your employees to pursue volunteer opportunities that they would personally enjoy. This could mean partnering with a variety of different nonprofits or having different types of volunteer opportunities. For example, you might offer group volunteer opportunities at an environmental nonprofit and an animal shelter nonprofit. Or, you could offer large-group volunteer events for employees who want to socialize with coworkers and volunteer grants for employees who prefer to give back on their own.
Other tips for encouraging employee volunteering include:
Aside from volunteering programs, you might implement other workplace giving initiatives to encourage your employees to get involved with social good. These initiatives might include matching gift programs, employee grant stipends, or automatic payroll deductions.
Employee volunteering provides your business with a variety of benefits, from a more positive brand image to strong partnerships with nonprofits in your community. Leverage this new knowledge and the suggestions above to create or improve your company’s volunteer programs. By doing so, you’ll create robust opportunities that your employees will be excited to participate in!