Realized Worth | Employee Volunteering & Workplace Giving: Corporate Social Responsibilty in the European Union

Last week, we had the opportunity to speak at the European Union's daylong conference, Communities in Social Responsibility, in Budapest. The following is a guest post by Robin Marshall summarizing the day and the topics discussed, including the five progressive levels of corporate citizenship (as related to employee volunteering).

Connecting communities

Call it Corporate Social Responsibility, call it Corporate Citizenship, either way, volunteerism is proving an ever-larger part of it. And so are the ideas of trust and faith, a belief that small things can lead to big changes. Most of all, it is about building communities.

Those were some of the core lessons to come out from a daylong conference called Communities in Social Responsibility held at the Kempinski Hotel Corvinus Budapest on May 19, 2011, organised by Hungarian Interchurch Aid in cooperation with E.ON and Vodafone.

Featuring guest speakers from Canada and Germany, along with workshops on Corporate Volunteering and HR and how to make best use of the opportunities in social media, presentations covered the perspective of mediators, NGOs and business, as well as best practice examples from E-ON and Vodafone.

But while the principal sponsors can be justly proud of what they have achieved, the idea of the day was not to create a stage from which they could grandstand. Rather, it was to spread knowledge and information about what is possible, and sharing that with as many people as possible.

Thus not only were the HR, PR, CSR leaders and Corporate Volunteering Coordinators of top Hungarian companies invited, but also partner businesses from Croatia, which has close links with Hungary and is on the way to EU membership.

Voadaphone & E-on

“Learn from our mistakes and take what worked,” said Gábor Intődy, Head of Internal Communications and CR at Vodafone Hungary. “There is no golden rule,” warned Dr. Eric Depluet, CEO, E-on Hungary, “but I can tell you what works for us.”

What Intődy, Depluet and the other speakers did was layout an effective framework within which volunteerism and CSR can not only function at a company level, but also flourish.

Key components include having a budget, having a solid understanding of what it is you want to do, seeking help from those who have knowledge you may lack (NGOs and moderators who can match the desire of your employees to help with those in need). An early, vital key to success is persuading senior management to buy-in. “At the end of the day, it all starts with the leadership,” said Depluet.

Intődy pointed out that the very concept of CSR, and the leading companies’ level of engagement with it, has radically changed. “Modern Corporate Social Responsibility is shifting from donations and cheque writing to an activity that is a lot more in-bedded into the corporate identity.” What that means in practise is “bringing our unique skills and experience to bear.” Vodafone concentrates its CSR into three main areas: building communities, education and security and safety.

Increasingly, social media sites such as facebook are becoming a means to connect with customers, but as a forum to engage in conversations about what is important to them, rather than simply as another channel through which to sell a message or product.

Skill sets are also brought to bear in the educational field, where Vodafone is part of the ROMAster programme run by the Hungarian Business Leaders’ Forum, offering scholarships and work placements to talented Roma students, with senior managers such as Intődy also mentoring them.

Involvement with the community can also lead to new markets. Vodafone has developed an emergency solution for an NGO that is given to women who are at risk of suffering domestic abuse. “It uses GPS tracking and mobile telephone technology to send a message to the police telling them the exact location of the woman if she feels threatened, without the need for her to make a phone call… How do you make money from CSR? We think we can probably sell that technology solution to foresters or bank security firms, for example.”

Like Vodafone, energy company E.ON takes a highly structured approach to its CSR programme, and has achieved much in a relatively short period of time. “We were late when we started in 2007,” Depluet said bluntly. “We were behind other companies, there was a danger we could be seen as a company that was outside the community rather than in it. CSR was a necessity.” Again, that word community. CSR is much more about connecting with the wider world, and your employees, about things that are important to them, than about good PR.

Both sponsoring companies make paid time available for their staff to engage in volunteerism on top of their usual holiday allowance. Both allow their employees to chose how (indeed if) they use that time. Compulsion doesn’t work; employees have to be free to do something that touches them. Both companies have found that employees feel better about their work because they are allowed to volunteer. Happy workers, endless studies have shown, are better workers, more productive, more willing to act as ambassadors for their employers. But it is a trust that has to be earned, from staff and customers alike. “I don’t believe you can buy good will,” Depluet warned.

Pattberg & Jarvis

Fabian Pattberg, a CSR and social media expert from Germany, joked, “My background is more as an Internet nerd, I guess.” But fellow speaker Chris Jarvis described Pattberg as, “Knowing everything there is to know about social media.” The German ran a workshop in the afternoon on PR and communication called Opportunities in social media: How to best communicate corporate volunteering (or other CSR) programmes.

At the same time, a Canadian Jarvis, co-founder and Senior Consultant for Realized Worth, a leading employee volunteering and CSR consulting firm, was shedding light on the practicalities of “how to make it happen from an employees’ perspective.”

But before he got down to the details, he presented another example of why CSR makes good business sense, a Harvard Business School report into North American retail giant Sears. The study found that if Sears could improve employee attitudes by five points that would in turn make a 1.3 improvement in customer satisfaction, which would lead to a 0.5% improvement in revenue. “It’s common sense really,” explained Jarvis. “If people like the shopping experience, they buy more stuff.” And when you are as big as Sears, even a 0.5% improvement amounts to $65 million dollars a year. “If we can get employees loving their jobs, we will be a bigger business,” Jarvis insisted.

Realized Worth

Jarvis and his partner and co-founder Angela Parker say their goal “is to elevate employee volunteering from a task-oriented activity to a transformative experience”. They have identified five progressive levels of corporate citizenship (as related to employee volunteering). First is private volunteering, undertaken by employees with no input from the company. Next up is supported employee volunteering, where the company is aware of the activity, and supportive of it, but plays no further role. Employer sponsored volunteering (staff are given time off to volunteer) is followed by employer planned volunteering (staff join a company project) and, finally, business integrated company volunteering, where CSR has become part of the DNA of a company.

Companies such as Walmart (which Jarvis says is now driving its CSR values through its supply chain) or IBM, have the ability to become game changers. The latter, for example, will pull together a Corporate Service Corps of individuals from across its business, send them out on a 30-day secondment to live in and help a remote community, and then bring them, the knowledge and experiences they have gained back to “make us smarter”, as Jarvis put it. The company has also developed some 200 modules that employees can access to help them in their volunteering, be it sitting on an NGO board or organising a nursery.

All business are different, which is why Jarvis and Parker will first sit down with a company (“one of the most important things we do in our work is listening”) to evaluate its goals and aims along with the aspirations of its staff, and how experienced they are in the field of volunteerism. Jarvis lauded the Vodafone’s “incredible examples”, but there is no point in trying to replicate its model if you don’t have the budget and your staff have never even painted a playground fence.

It is also important to find effective partners who can “bridge the gap” between volunteers and NGOs, who themselves are usually the link to people in need. If corporate volunteerism isn’t properly planned, it won’t serve the employee (“what employees want is a sense of meaning and purpose in live, it’s part of the human condition,” Jarvis explained), the employer, the NGO or the intended recipients.

Whatever the company, there are four conditions that must be met to have a successful programme, Jarvis said “Why conditions? Conditioning is what you need to do to make it work in the real world.” These are space, structure, movement and motivation.

Speaking afterwards, Jarvis said it was hard to predict what level of volunteerism take up a company might have. “I can give you the average figure, and that’s 20%, but that probably more reflects how bad the measuring is. How you record such data is one of the biggest talking points right now.” Suffice it to say, however, that if you have set up a corporate volunteerism scheme and a couple of years in find your employee take up figures are below 20%, you probably need to go back and look at those four areas again.

Sadly, there isn’t room here to go into more detail, but Realized Worth’s web- and blog-site (http://realizedworth.blogspot.com) contains a lot more information. Other speakers at the conference were László Lehel, President-director of Hungarian Interchurch Aid (HIA), Dr. Anikó Lévai, Goodwill Ambassador of HIA, Dr. Radácsi László, Lead of Volunteering and Partnering Working Group at Hungarian Business Leaders Forum, András F.Tóth, Executive director, National Volunteer Centre of Hungary), Kristóf Gáncs, Head of Unit, Corporate Relations, HIA, and Borbála Papp-Váry, Deputy State Secretary, State Secretariat for Government Communication, Ministry of Public Administration and Justice.

Robin Marshall is a fully qualified journalist with more than 22 years experience, the last 10 as managing editor of an English-language newspaper based in Budapest, Hungary. He has a proven track record at running editorial departments to tight budgets while maintaining quality. Marshall is equally at home working alone or managing a multi-national team.