Engagement

Employee engagement is vital to any successful company. Unhappy employees make bad ambassadors. Offering employees to further their social values is an excellent opportunity to generate corporate good will while rewarding employees.

     If you want to maximize employee potential, engage them!

Engagement, philanthropy and volunteering

Employee benefits and compensation packages only go so far. Engaging staff through philanthropy  has an impact on morale, motivation and skills. Corporate volunteer programs are on the rise in the USA, but less so in Europe. Millennials are changing that. They look at compensation but also at the employer's social conscience, opportunities to do good and work abroad on work time.Volunteer programs, social and charity work can be  linked to job descriptions. Volunteering is actually a very effective experiential learning, real life training, of great value to any employer!

An opportunity to make a difference, a social impact, will make the employee more satisfied with his/her job. Obvious areas where individual goals align with company interests are leadership, team work and go abroad opportunities.

Measuring the impact

The value of charity work and volunteering is appreciated by most of us but management wants to understand how it is good for business.

Are employees more engaged, more loyal? How to measure engagement? What is actually the contribution to the bottom line and to society too?

      Companies will want to rethink how to assess impact.

Statistics, numbers?

Statistics in the annual report, numbers, how many people have been helped, how many computers were donated, has limited impact on company image in the public eye. Narratives, stories, have! 

Soft, qualitative proof, volunteer testimonials, this  is where the employee can pay a pivotal role in creating goodwill for the company

Telling a story

Compare a statement on a corporate website '...team members donated their working time to charities working with children and the less fortunate...' to a story on mass or social media by a staff member, volunteer,  explaining how he/she was able to donate paid time to charity work and how this work benefited less fortunate local people!

Stories engage people,  facts excite accountants.

Showing a story

People are more inspired by stories than statistics. An engaging and convincing story by an employee volunteer makes for better publicity than any technocratic performance indicator and people prefer to share stories rather than facts. 

     Images, videos engage more than text. A film about someone's success has more emotional impact than a documentary.

The bottom line

The company where employees tell and share stories, videos, how they gained satisfaction and personal development from volunteering will be a more attractive employer, especially .to young talent!

If the employee volunteer describes the benefits of the volunteer work to local people , the employer stand to gain positive publicity. If the volunteer and the local community, together testify to the benefits, the employer will gain even more positive publicity and goodwill!

This a powerful and future way to build brand and gain goodwill, more powerful than any numbers. It will eventually affect the bottom line! 

And it will boost the CV of any employee with an ambition to move on, modern employers notice!