Volunteering is booming. The combination of high unemployment, government promotion and the rise of the corporate social responsibility agenda has meant an upsurge in the number of people prepared to help good causes for free.

According to Volunteering England, volunteer centres around the country placed 30 per cent more people in 2008-09 than the preceding year. And research among 450 private-sector organisations by the Social Investment Consultancy revealed that, although corporate donations to charity were set to fall because of the recession, 80 per cent of respondents thought that organisations that cut their giving should increase other forms of help, such as employee volunteering.

For employers, the benefits of supporting volunteering are usually seen in terms of attracting and retaining staff and improving employee engagement. But those employers with the most strategic approach to volunteering are looking at the learning benefits that staff gain, and building these into personal development plans.

“We know that employee volunteering helps to develop skills including communication, project management, leadership and teamworking,” says Gennie Franklin, acting director of employee volunteering at Business In The Community (BITC). “Ninety-five per cent of employee volunteers we work with say their experience has developed skills, 45 per cent of which they can directly use at work.”

The learning agenda is one that organisations which use volunteers are keen to support. Bodies that recruit statutory volunteers, such as school governors, magistrates or independent monitoring board members for prisons, all argue that employers benefit from the high-level, structured activities that their people are part of, often over many years.

Charities also prefer volunteers with skills. Indeed there are those who argue that the most common type of employer-supported volunteering – team “challenge events”, in which a group of colleagues paint a room, clear a space or generally get their hands dirty for a good cause – are not always as useful to charities as they could be.

“There is a certain level of frustration among charities about challenge events,” says Fabia Bates, director of corporate community involvement at Red Foundation, a social enterprise that provides consultancy on volunteering.
 
“They can be time consuming and cost the charity money – and a huge segment of the corporate sector doesn’t appreciate that.” Stories abound of charities having to get professional decorators in to cover up the poor job done by team challenge volunteers. “Sometimes charities can be too reactive and accept challenge teams in the hope that there will be greater engagement with the employer afterwards,” says Bates. “It’s about being careful what you agree to. If B&Q came to you and said they wanted to help you do up a building, that would be different from a group of bankers offering the same thing.”

Skills-based volunteering can take many forms. It may be about doing pro bono work or offering services that are very close to “the day job”, such as an IT department setting up a computer network for a charity. Or it could be more about using skills in a different context or acquiring new ones.

A whole niche sector has sprung up of organisations prepared to broker opportunities between employers and charities in a bid to get a better fit. Some operate as charities themselves, charging fees from employers to cover matchmaking costs. Others operate as commercial organisations, creating structured training around a charity project and including a donation to the charity as part of the fee.

Sarah King is chief executive of Reach Volunteering, which specialises in matching skilled volunteers, both individual and employer-supported, with charities seeking trustees or other skilled volunteers.

King first experienced the career benefits of volunteering when she was on an executive development programme at Lloyds TSB and was encouraged as part of that to become a trustee of the Gloucestershire Resource Centre, a local arts charity. “It taught me about strategic leadership and ‘not doing’. I had got to the point of managing large teams, but a well-functioning board member has to show leadership without doing the doing,” she explains.

Reach has around 3,500 charity opportunities on its books, either project-based positions or ongoing posts such as being a mentor, adviser or trustee. Although it usually matches up volunteers with existing opportunities, it has on occasion solicited projects for particular work teams – such as getting the communications team of a major corporation to help charities with their marketing and communications strategies. King says Reach is now tending toward a more systematic approach to the corporate volunteering sector in an attempt to ensure better matches.

“We’re trying to get companies to articulate what they want to achieve and how volunteering can help. By having conversations with all the client groups – charities, volunteers and employers – the drop-off rate falls significantly,” she says. These conversations, she adds, also equip HR managers to sell the idea of volunteering better within their organisations, so that it’s not just a “CSR tick-box exercise”, but something that delivers real benefits.

At Cornwall-based food company Ginsters, volunteering has been built into an essential part of the HR strategy. The programme started seriously about six years ago, says head of learning Nicky Taylor, using the services of Business in the Community to find opportunities. Now, she says, “we find that employees are so passionate about it that they take the lead in generating volunteering opportunities – which in turn develops people’s pride and confidence in themselves because they are doing something that they have identified”.

Taylor’s point is backed up by findings from the Institute of Volunteering Research in 2007. It found that the ability to choose what activities to take part in acted as the biggest incentive, after paid time off, to getting people to participate in employer-supported volunteering schemes.

King cites an experience with one employer who sponsored staff to go to Africa to build houses with the charity Habitat for Humanity. The opportunity was subsequently offered to graduates, who were given extra time off to take part. The following year, she recalls, some graduates started saying they wanted to do different things. “It can be excluding if there is limited choice,” says King. “Not everyone can go abroad and not everyone can accommodate volunteering around their other commitments. The emotional ability to fit it in is important too.”

The opposite issue needs to be managed as well. “We have perpetual volunteers who come forward for opportunities again and again – we try to be fair in letting everyone have the chance to take part,” says Taylor.

The structured volunteering that Ginsters favours is often team-based. “If a new project team is coming together that has never worked together before, we schedule in a voluntary activity,” says Taylor. A popular option is going on a soup run with the local Salvation Army, delivering meals to homeless people in the area. “People get to understand a lot about each other on an activity like that. They have a shared experience that helps them to bond,” she says.

Staff are also encouraged either to act up into a team leader role, or if they are managers, to step down. “When someone goes in as team leader you can see talents in them you didn’t know existed,” says Taylor. Conversely, she adds, senior managers who take part in a team activity where they are not in charge can reflect on their own leadership style, by seeing the effect a team leader has in another context. To ensure that people get the best value from such opportunities, they have structured conversations with their line manager afterwards. “Part of the evaluation is to ask what they have learnt and how that has influenced what they will do,” says Taylor.

She believes the volunteering programme is one of the measures that has contributed to a dramatic increase in staff engagement and a fall in turnover from 28 per cent to 14 per cent over the past five years. “It took a good few years for volunteering to become embedded in our culture,” says Taylor. “Now it’s part of what we do.”

Age Concern and Santander
Santander has a long tradition of encouraging volunteering, principally as part of its CSR agenda. But the bank is now raising awareness of the learning benefits through its Volunteering for Development programme. Staff can now take an online test to identify types of volunteering that could help them to acquire useful skills for their day jobs.

For employees identified as “high potential”, the bank goes one step further, initiating conversations about volunteering and development. Eighteen months ago it piloted a high-level mentoring programme in which four senior executives mentored local chief executives from the charity Age Concern. The idea was to help senior Santander people develop their coaching skills in a safe environment, says head of talent management Caroline Curtis, while offering strategic mentoring to some of Age Concern’s top decision-makers. “When senior people have been in a role for a while, they can get a particular mindset,” says Curtis.

Exposing them to counterparts in the voluntary sector can be a very useful form of development and can be more cost effective than sending them on an executive development programme, she adds. A particularly successful pairing was between Mike Palfreman, then chief executive of Age Concern Havering, in Essex, and Mark Selby, Santander’s head of retail integration, who has been working on bringing Bradford & Bingley and Alliance & Leicester into Santander. Selby says that for him one of the big benefits was the opportunity to practise coaching and mentoring skills in a context “where you cannot fall into being directive, as you might with people that report to you”.

Selby has subsequently used the skills learnt by taking “a more questioning approach” to resolving the creative tension that exists between divisions when trying to integrate two organisations.

Palfreman, meanwhile, says that Selby “challenged me to think logically and introduced me to a new way of thinking and approaching problems”. He has since moved on from Age Concern, although the two still maintain contact.

“A lot of corporate volunteering is about fundraising or clearing up a playground,” says Selby. “This was something that brought real value through both of us being put in a different environment that was risk free. The only cost to Mike or me of the arrangement not working would have been a bit of lost time.”

Being a school governor
Jacquelyn Collins has been a school governor since 2008, when the School Governors One Stop Shop (SGOSS) charity visited her workplace. Now community affairs manager for City law firm Slaughter and May, Collins says the learning and development benefits of being a governor are substantial. She has become more adept at probing and challenging, has learnt to be better organised and to deal with a wider variety of people. In addition she has a much better understanding of the education system and the pressures faced by schools and teachers. “For people who are junior to middle management, this is the kind of volunteering that builds the skills you need,” says Collins. It’s also personally very satisfying because “you don’t realise what a difference you can make until you do something like this”.

Steve Acklam, chief executive of SGOSS, says that encouraging staff to become school governors requires relatively little of employers, because most of the work takes place outside the working day. Research done among governors by the University of Hertfordshire shows that they most often benefit from practising and enhancing soft skills such as negotiating, influencing and conflict resolution.


Being a magistrate
Alison Middleton, head of reward and employee relations at law firm Baker & McKenzie, has always been interested in crime and why people commit it. It led her to become a magistrate six years ago while working at the Clifford Chance law firm – and to reduce her work hours to a nine-day fortnight to accommodate the 26 half-day sittings a year magistrates must attend. Middleton sits on the northwest Essex bench in the adult courts, but plans to move to the family courts soon. She says the opportunity to develop special expertise is one of the benefits of statutory volunteering, because there is a whole structure you can move through.

Being a magistrate has helped Middleton acquire and hone skills that she finds useful at work, such as making structured decisions based on clearly articulated arguments. “It’s useful whenever I have to put the business case for something, such as new policies or policy proposals,” she says.

Since having children, Middleton works four days a week and sits either on days off or on “volunteering days” offered by her firm. “I have tremendous loyalty to the company because I am able do something that is very dear to me,” says Middleton. “Not every employer would allow that.”