Voluntary Measures

A new report on employee volunteering, ‘UK Employee Volunteering 2022-23’, has for the first time brought some revealing insights into this under-researched but often carried out activity. Not-for-profit social enterprise and employee volunteering specialist, Works4U, carried out a UK survey and interviews of employees asking about their experiences of employee volunteering during 2022-23.

The report provides for the first-time insight into not just how much employee volunteering takes place but gives analysis on how it takes place, how much time is available for employees to volunteer, the perception of the impact of employee volunteering and whether employees think employers are doing enough to promote volunteering?

The Covid-19 pandemic brought almost a complete halt to employee volunteering, but the report reveals that not only has it recovered to pre-pandemic levels, it has also significantly increased. 51 per cent of survey respondents said that employers had organised volunteering compared to only 10 per cent in the year prior to the pandemic.

Despite this positive increase, employers are not keeping up with the demand from employees with 94.2 per cent saying employers should do more to promote volunteering opportunities as 98.4 per cent stated they would volunteer with work again. Nearly a quarter, 24.7 per cent, said they did not know how much time their employer allowed for volunteering. 27 per cent stated they had to organise the volunteering themselves and for many this acts as a barrier as they do not have time to both participate and organise the volunteering.

Works4U CEO Dominic Pinkney stated: “The results of the survey and interviews we carried out are quite revealing. It is so great to see the level of employer organised volunteering increasing but fascinating that this is still far behind the expectations of employees. There has been a shift in perception of volunteering by employees, changing from being a nice to have, to being seen very much as a business-as-usual activity but not all employers have caught up.”

There is a wide variety of time allowed by employers to volunteer with 39 per cent survey respondents saying they had one day per year to volunteer, 33 per cent had two days, 17 per cent three days, 3 per cent four days. However, there are 8 per cent that offer 5 days or more with many saying that it is flexible, on a case-by-case basis, depending on the volunteering opportunity.

The report also dispels, somewhat, the theory that those who volunteer with work are mainly people who also volunteer outside of work. A small majority, 53.6 per cent, of survey respondents said they also volunteered outside of work and many of these, 60 per cent, said this acted as a barrier to volunteering with work.

Impact of employee volunteering was also analysed in the report and it shows that employees perceive their volunteering delivered impact with 73.4 per cent rating the impact as 4 or 5 out of 5 and just 8.9 per cent rated it as 2 or lower. Works4U believe this is a positive trend as impact of employee volunteering is a key metric and sometimes businesses can lose this focus with other indicators. Dominic Pinkney added on this point, “when evaluating employee volunteering programmes, volunteer hours is vanity, volunteering culture is sanity and impact is king.”

Despite this activity being carried out by corporates and other businesses in the UK for more than six decades there is a surprising lack of research and data on employee volunteering. This activity has developed from the 1960s where there was discussion and debate whether corporates had a social responsibility or not to today’s world where employee volunteering can be considered a normal business activity. However, most of the research that supports this is anecdotal or snippets of analysis by studies whose focus is something else.