She's been to Sri Lanka and South Africa as a participant in Accenture Development Partnerships, a program that sends employees to work on nonprofit projects in developing countries.
As more employees see volunteer work as a way to learn new skills or move their careers forward, volunteering has become a sort of corporate benefit.
For an annual fee between $5,000 and $50,000, companies can give their employees access to a VolunteerMatch list of 55,300 nonprofits seeking help. Nonprofits join for free.
Field said one major attraction for companies is the chance to align their employee volunteer programs with the objective of their business.
Volunteer programs are tied efforts to retain two major employee groups, younger workers looking for work-life balance and ready-to-retire older workers who want to serve their communities,
Bramhall, 29 agreed the Development Partnerships program is a retention tool for Accenture.
Workers who are part of Gen Y say they want a job that lets them also exercise their personal values and beliefs, according to a study by Deloitte & Touche USA LLC. The study shows 62 percent of Gen Y respondents between the ages of 18 and 26 want to work for companies that give them a chance to use their skills to help a nonprofit.
Lupe Garcia, associate general counsel in the legal department at Gap, Inc. said her supervisors have recognized the fundraising and communication skills she developed in her volunteer work have increased her skills
Employees at Gap can spend up to five hours of paid time each month on a volunteer activity. If they spend 15 hours of their own time volunteering, Gap will give $150 to the organization, as well as matching any employee donations.
"An important driver in wanting to do this was really a desire to do something with my skills that had a broader impact, that had a deeply social impact," Coghlan said.
Internal communication and collaboration within intranets has documented solid ROI’s encouraging companies to look to it more and more for increased innovation and decreased costs.
Q. So how do you activate your internal community to reach a positive ROI?
A. Facilitate Employee Engagement within the platform.
A successful company and a thriving corporate culture doesn’t come from an org chart and people identified by numbers it comes from HUMANS, community, and allowing other users to benefit from each other’s expertise. Successful internal community participation directly and indirectly helps users across divisions and regions achieve their goals, find experts, and collaborate efficiently.
Successful internal community participation directly and indirectly helps users across divisions and regions achieve their goals, find experts, and collaborate efficiently.
Internal communication and collaboration within intranets has documented solid ROI’s encouraging companies to look to it more and more for increased innovation and decreased costs. While many organizations have achieved these positive ROI’s, the process to realizing them is often challenged. Activating the community, and getting users to interact with each other becomes a difficult behavioral change, but one that is invaluable to the company as a whole and its employees
No one is participating because companies are simply using a different communication medium for the same old message. The voice of a community should reign relevant to the workers, not the executives, a common mistake we see with many failed internal community and intranet projects. The fastest way to make a community relevant and to gain participation is to make it human and to upgrade the messaging to fit the distribution tool.
Identify ambassadors/ Experts: Don’t ignore those able to deliver genuine knowledge, identify them, embrace them, and give them room to speak in a HUMAN voice. Engagement breeds engagement. People who are most likely to contribute include natural leaders, employee’s active on other social networks, and members who had a say in the initial community planning stages,
Recognize these experts: Thank users who do participate. Many companies build communities prompting “Find an Expert” “Ask a Question” but the true value of the question and answer feature is getting people to answer those questions.
Invest in Information Architecture and User Experience: We’ve seen several communities that are lacking engagement because it is unclear to users HOW to engage. Investments in information architecture are often over looked, even though they are vitally important.