Employee happiness and fulfillment can be a huge factor in the success of any company. Happy employees lead to productive employees, which is key in achieving workplace success. All of this is easier said than done. Employees have good days and bad days, and bad days can lead them to be emotionally distressed or unproductive. What can companies do to help boost morale and encourage the reputation of content workers?
Organized employee volunteerism or community service is an excellent way to get employees interacting in a different environment outside of the office. It can aid in connecting employees on a different level, making their communities a better place and potentially enhancing their work environment.
When employees are committed to their day-to-day work, they gain a sense of purpose in their lives. Adding volunteer work towards causes that matters can help to further provide employees with a sense of meaning. Organizations are finding that providing their employees with the chance to give back can help them feel renewed and open their eyes to the actual importance of their jobs. What better way to engage and rejuvenate employee morale than through doing something great for a local non-profit?
The implementation of community service can offset a chain reaction. When employees are more engaged within the community and within their jobs, company’s turnover rates become lower and the chance of employees resigning can become significantly lower. This is true even for those employees who do not volunteer in their private lives. Deloitte’s corporate volunteerism report shows that 61% of those who rarely or never volunteer would consider a company’s commitment to the community when making a job decision.
As we mentioned in our “How Volunteering Can Help You Land a Job” blog, non-profit engagement can be a great way to expand your skill set or build upon existing skills to help you in your job search. The same can be said for those engaging in organized employee volunteering. It can allow the employees of an organization to build upon their skills and work on new ones to become better and more productive within the jobs they hold. Employees are able to learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses, which can aid in building strong cross-functional teams. A natural and positive environment is provided for employee “training” at a low or no cost to the company.
Companies can begin tracking employee volunteer hours and providing incentives in order to help encourage participation. Incentives can include money donated to local charities or non-profits. This sort of healthy competition is one in which everybody wins and employees become more engaged in forming new relationships and being productive in the workplace.
Recognizing employee contribution and celebrating the successes of these employees and the company as whole is an important step in ensuring the success of organized volunteering.
Organized volunteering helps to increase employee engagement, happiness and morale and at the same time help the company become an involved member of their community by helping out local non-profits. Most importantly, aside from all of these benefits, volunteerism programs help to make a world a better place-one good deed at a time.
Find out ways that you (or your company) can make a contribution by signing up for a free account on GozAround and browsing open volunteer opportunities! If you’re looking for a way to track your corporate employee volunteer hours, we can help you with that too. Please contact us at support@gozaround.com
