Ethos Public Relations Manchester

Volunteering shame!

by Shaun

I was aghast when I read recently that only 14% of employers encourage volunteering and 13% actually forbid it! And these are the same companies, I assume, that the Government is relying on to help lead us out of the economic crisis and support the Big Society!

At Ethos public relations, although we have always encouraged our employees to volunteer – and some do, for example as a school governor or helping out at a disabled sailing charity – in recent months we’ve taken steps to proactively encourage all staff to volunteer during working hours.

To do this, we have introduced a ‘community days and sabbaticals’ policy, in order to encourage our people to engage with the community. The policy sets out the paid time that employees are entitled to for working with recognised community groups.

Of course requests for community days have to take into the account the needs of the business, but our aim is to only refuse time off in exceptional circumstances.

Although it is early days for our new policy, one person has already booked community days in the summer and others are thinking about what they can do. I’m sure the policy isn’t perfect, and will be refined over the months and years to come, but it’s a start, and something that is at the heart of our business ethos.

The issue for us isn’t about making time for volunteering available (that’s now clearly laid out in the policy) but about encouraging our dedicated, hard working staff to take time off to volunteer. Because of this, I can fully appreciate the findings of the IFF research which show that, regardless of support from employers, less than 10% of staff volunteer during working hours. This needs to change for all companies and at Ethos we’re determined to make it happen.

The issue of volunteering was high up on the agenda at our staff conference last year and we will be reviewing progress at our next conference in the autumn, but for now I’d encourage my colleagues to step away from the office and their PCs for a while to help others in the community.

Posted at 2:05pm on 9^th June 2011