8 Steps to Craft an Employee-First Volunteering Program

Shifting to an “employee-first” ethos is about reimagining your role as program leader. You need to reset priorities to align with employee needs.

As a program leader, your role is to connect employees to opportunities they want. Remember, most people want to volunteer. As the Deloitte survey referenced earlier suggests, most employees have an innate desire to give back. So don’t approach them as if they need convincing or cajoling. 

Our advice: See yourself as a facilitator. There are countless volunteer opportunities out there; your mission is to connect people with the ones that will be meaningful and convenient for them. You provide the structure, but employee values should set the course for your program.

This is not a complex strategy, but it’s essential. You need to give your employees dedicated volunteer time off (VTO). This time shouldn’t be lumped in with other paid time off. You want to create a designated bank of hours that they can use exclusively for volunteering.

Companies offer a wide range of VTO policies, with most falling between 8 to 40 hours per year. If you’re just starting a program, it might make sense to start small—offering one or two days to each employee. But as your program grows and evolves, you might consider upping that number. Increasing your VTO allotment is an easy way to show you’re invested in your employees and your community.

All that said, providing VTO doesn’t mean much if your employees don’t feel like they have the bandwidth or flexibility to use it. Be sure that managers are supporting employees who want to volunteer. And make an effort to plan your volunteer events around big business initiatives or busy seasons, if you have them. 

Splunk, the data software company, offers their employees 40 hours of VTO per year. This policy fits into their broader social impact pledge of donating $100 million in software licenses, training, support, education, and volunteer time over a 10-year period. By linking the volunteer program to broader company goals, they make it easier for employees and managers to understand how volunteering fits into the bigger picture.

As you build your program, make sure you clarify how much VTO you’ll offer and how much flexibility employees will have to use it. Without that support, it’ll be hard to garner the enthusiasm and engagement you need to make your program self-sustaining.

Getting employees to volunteer can be a little like trying to convince them to exercise. Most people want to volunteer. They know they should, but sometimes they struggle to actually make it happen. This is where you can add a little extra motivation. 

One way to help motivate employees is to tap into the heuristics (i.e., behavioral psychology) that influences how people make decisions. For instance, loss aversion bias is the strong tendency people have to avoid losses. Loss aversion bias says that a person is much more motivated to avoid losing something they have than gaining something they don’t have. 

With this bias in mind, you could make your VTO “use it or lose it.” Rather than trying to explain all the benefits of volunteering (which people probably already know), think about framing your messaging to tap into each person’s aversion to loss. Set a deadline by which employees have to use all their VTO for the year and make it easy for them to do so. 

Another way to provide a little outside motivation is to match employee volunteer hours with donations. For every hour or day someone volunteers, your company could donate a certain amount of money to the nonprofit organization. This approach helps each volunteer make a deeper impact and can motivate people to get involved. 

The Allstate Foundation’s Helping Hands Grant program matches volunteer hours with monetary donations. Employees who volunteer can help earn grants of $500 to $1,000 for the nonprofit organizations they choose.

While you want to honor your employees’ innate desire to give back, it never hurts to add a little extra motivation to help them take the first step. Plus that motivation can help keep them engaged over time, supporting the virtuous cycle that will help others get involved.

Employees shouldn’t feel like volunteering stands alone as the only effort the company is making to connect with community members and engage in corporate social responsibility. You should be able to articulate how volunteering fits into your business’s broader commitment to social good.

You also want volunteering to be part of a larger company culture that values empathy, interconnectedness, and authenticity. If, internally, your workplace doesn’t reflect these values, it will be hard to get employees genuinely excited about representing your company as they volunteer out in the community. 

Shifting company culture is not something that happens overnight, but as you build out your volunteering program, if you notice a disconnect between your CSR mission and your internal practices, you need to make a plan to realign them. 

Though running the volunteer program will likely fall on an HR or CSR team, volunteering should feel like a company-wide initiative. All company leaders should promote opportunities and champion the effort. 

Keep track of who participates. If only certain teams consistently participate, there might be an opportunity to do more outreach to involve other teams. You don’t want volunteering to be something only some employees feel invited to do. Ensuring that everyone in the company feels invited to volunteer will help support the growth that feeds the virtuous cycle.

For years, Patagonia has been an example of a company with a strong social impact mission. Their volunteer program is no exception. The company offers an environmental internship program, which gives employees the chance to take two months away from their regular roles to work for an environmental group of their choice. During this time, they still get their regular paycheck and benefits from Patagonia. This deep investment gives a huge boost to grassroot organizations. Plus employees return to their work with a renewed sense of purpose and inspiration. 

Launching a volunteer program is a good opportunity to check the internal culture at your company. If it needs some recalibration, that’s okay. Be upfront with employees about what you notice and how you plan to address it.

Part of making volunteering approachable for your team is syncing the way you volunteer with how you already work. Lean into your strengths as a team. 

Leveraging relationships between coworkers is a great way to use the team-building you’ve already done internally to help bolster your volunteer program. If you have employee resource groups (ERGs), encourage group leaders to create volunteer activities for their members. 

Turn volunteering into a social experience. One way to do this is to make it easy for people to see who else has signed up for an event. This visibility can help people get excited about getting involved—think about how much more likely you are to participate in a new activity if you know other people who’ll be there. 

Enabling employees to create their own events is another really important strategy. This democratization allows anyone who’s passionate about a cause to organize an activity and invite their colleagues to join them. It’s so much more meaningful to get a personal invitation from a coworker than to get an email from HR asking for volunteers. Empowering employees to share their enthusiasm helps foster a deeper sense of community and camaraderie, and will help your program become self-sustaining. 

You also want to think about the logistics of how you work. If you’re a distributed team, this might mean creating virtual volunteering events. 

During the early waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, Zendesk, the customer service software company, created virtual volunteering opportunities that tapped into their global workforce. Employees from Manila to San Francisco to Krakow helped nonprofits, government agencies, and healthcare facilities translate information to reach local community members, including homebound senior citizens. 

As you design your program, be sure to tap into what your company has already built—the relationships and habits that you can leverage to create a better employee volunteer experience.

As employees make decisions about whether to stay with their current employers or look for new opportunities, company culture and social impact are playing a big role. People want to be part of a team that cares about people, shows up for its community, and centers the employee experience. 

An employee-first volunteer program can be the bedrock of a healthy team culture. With the right approach, you can create a self-sustaining program that’s built on employees’ values. But you need to be strategic about how you structure your processes and the tools you use. One thing’s for sure—it’s time to start thinking more about how your company can be a stronger force for good.