3 ways to overlay social impact
As ESG becomes a more integrated component of business strategy, growing companies are appreciating the value of volunteering as an employee engagement tactic that helps team members align with their purpose at work. Smaller companies that don’t have social impact teams in place (or even those that do) can find it difficult to free up the resources necessary to launch a coordinated volunteer program. The good news is that you don’t need to have a day of service or a formal strategy to see the benefits of social impact in the workplace. By integrating positive social contributions into existing processes and activities, busy teams can introduce their employees to volunteering at scale, without adding another item to their to-do lists. Many companies use what I’m calling the “overlay method” to increase their volunteer activation rates and build more inclusive cultures of service. Here are a few examples of how it can play out.
Micro-volunteering
50% of Americans say that they want to volunteer but lack access to flexible volunteering opportunities. While the ultimate goal of volunteering is to create transformative experiences by forcing the volunteer out of their comfort zone — something that can only be done through consistency and commitment — a great way to introduce your team members to volunteering is to give them quick, accessible, and satisfying opportunities to give back. Enter micro-volunteering: easy, no-commitment, cost-free actions that take less than 30 minutes to complete.
Micro-volunteering: volunteering that is done in short periods of time, without a long-term commitment on behalf of the volunteer.
Micro-volunteers can expose human rights violations with Amnesty’s Decoders, empower students with career advice through CareerVillage, or give assistance to a blind person with BeMyEyes. I encourage companies to introduce a micro-volunteering session during an all-hands meeting and survey employees before and after to see how a short burst of giving back decreased their stress and impacted their connection with their workplace and colleagues. Micro-volunteering can also be incorporated into everyday routines — picking up trash on your morning run or dropping off canned food at your local shelter are just two examples that totally count. While it’ll never replace the transformative, empathy-building experience of a regular volunteer commitment, micro-volunteering is a great way to give the uninitiated their first “dopamine-hit” of giving back. By combining micro-volunteering sessions with pre- and post-surveys, you can gather data to build a stronger case for social impact in your business.
Job-purposing
Giving your team members the opportunity to view their work through a lens of meaning and value instils employment with a higher purpose, elevates workers’ understanding of what they’re doing, and transforms their engagement and productivity. The term — which was created to the brilliant consultant and author Bea Boccalandro — means incorporating positive social contributions as part of the work experience. It’s radically inclusive and also gives the opportunity for hourly workers — for whom traditional volunteering may not be accessible — to engage with social impact.
For example, Caesars Entertainments’ housekeeping team collects used soap and toiletry products from hotel rooms instead of throwing them away. They’re then cleaned, recycled and sent to families around the world through Ceasars’ partnership with Clean the World. Simply by doing their jobs, housekeepers know that they’re preventing disease and improving the quality of life for people in vulnerable communities. The idea to recycle the soap came from within the housekeeping team, started small, and scaled up. If you’re looking to incorporate positive social impact into more of your team members’ daily lives, asking them for ideas and conducting a small pilot program (with their buy-in of course) is a good place to start. There are many more ways to “job-purpose” though. According to Bea Boccalandro, there are 12! Look into her book (which I loved) for more info.
Education as service
When COVID forced teams to go remote, many companies expanded their definition of volunteering to include informal acts of kindness or civic actions that fit more organically into the lives of their employees. Since the biggest and easiest to measure impact of volunteering is on the volunteers themselves, empowering your employees to be advocates for positive change in their communities is an effective, accessible, and efficient way to incorporate social impact into your engagement strategy. The idea of education-as-service empowers employees to become more active in their community by breaking up larger campaigns into educational social impact moments that build on each other. For example, a campaign around Earth day could include weekly activities like reading an article on local climate policy, attending a composting workshop, and picking up trash around the neighborhood.
Join my workshop!
If you want more tips for creating a more purposeful workplace culture through volunteering, join Driving Workplace Purpose Through Volunteering on 3/9! We’ll discuss these and other ways to make social impact more accessible through virtual volunteering, employee-led campaigns, and strategic sustainability.
