Part of the way in which businesses can contribute to society lies in employee volunteering (EV), which has become an integral part of corporate social responsibility (CSR). When conducted as part of an ongoing, long-term strategy, EV has the potential to contribute not only to an improved bottom line, but also to uplift staff morale, to increased staff retention and to enhance the company’s reputation in the community.
The key, however, is to embed EV into the core business strategy to achieve shared value, a business proposition that drives both social innovation and economic success.
Exploring the challenge of how to align EV with core business was the aim of the Beyond Painting Classrooms (BPC) workshop, hosted and sponsored by FirstRand and supported by Charities Aid Foundation Southern Africa (Cafsa) and the Mail & Guardian, in Cape Town last week.
The workshop was the fourth in a series of formal discussions following the first national corporate EV conference in 2013. Delegates at the workshop included representatives from corporate and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), local government and higher education institutions.
“Our hope as FirstRand is that participants in the Beyond Painting Classrooms initiative will take from this the greater need of working together, and strategies on how we all as corporate South Africa can take a bolder approach to embedding employee volunteerism into how we do business,” said Sizwe Nxasana, chief executive of FirstRand.
“Employee volunteering” conjures up images of employees spending days outside the office digging vegetable gardens, building toilets and painting school classrooms — usually on Mandela Day. The intention behind such initiatives is always positive, and the good they do is undeniable. But once-off days spent helping the needy are not sustainable, and the benefit they deliver is limited.
Corporate volunteering initiatives often happen as an afterthought or as once-off projects with meagre budgets, rather than as a mainstream aspect of corporate strategy. For corporate social efforts to make a sustainable contribution to society, they need to be ongoing and form an integral part of the company’s commercial activities.
“Corporate social responsibility is legislated, and employee volunteering falls under that broader heading. But corporates are realising that they need to give socially not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because it also makes strategic business sense,” said Karena Cronin, Cafsa business development manager: knowledge management.
Cronin highlighted the importance of the notion of shared value to a company’s corporate social responsibility strategy. She emphasised that shared value exists when corporate expertise is leveraged to pursue a business opportunity while also solving a social problem.
“If a company’s core business is banking, for example, it has a lot to more to offer in terms of administrative assistance and knowledge sharing than it does in painting a building or digging a garden. Corporate employee volunteering is best when it is aligned with your core business.”
Stephan Claassen, provincial head of FNB Business, shared the example of the FNB Wealth and Investment team in Cape Town, which is hosting a series of seminars with NGOs to assist them with sustainable investment strategies.
Desiree Storey, manager of the FirstRand volunteers programme and initiator of the BPC project, said: “Our programme does not discount the team building initiatives organised by companies — they do good work and must continue. Beyond Painting Classrooms is about taking employee volunteering further and working on its entrenchment into the business model. This makes it more meaningful in terms of what companies can offer, based on specific skills and knowledge sharing.”
Lesley Ann van Selm, managing director of Khulisa Social Solutions, emphasised that a corporate volunteer programme should be a collaborative, needs-driven investment between corporates, NGOs and the government as partners to activate sustainable change and positive social impact within a community.
“Employee volunteer programmes are all very well, but unless they are embedded in the long-term corporate strategy in a meaningful, measurable system where volunteers feel they’re contributing towards the building of social capital in the communities in which they’re working, it becomes tokenism.
“You need to find out what the community wants and tailor your programme to their needs. Only once we bring all respective parties — corporates, NGOs, government, and institutions of higher learning — together, can we then start making a measurable social impact.”
One of the challenges facing people who are involved in CSR programmes is sourcing and sharing knowledge about communities. Participants on the day emphasised that the results of research conducted in the development sector and the donor space by various players needed to be made more accessible, so it could be shared for the greater good.
Janice McMillan, senior lecturer and convenor of the University of Cape Town’s Global Citizenship: Leading for Social Justice programme, said: “Democracy in our country is far too important for us all to be working in silos. Employee volunteering should be seen as part of a broader learning and development pathway towards building capacity and encouraging active citizenship.”
Although the majority of companies in South Africa are still in the “business is only about business” mindset, there have been a considerable number of large corporates that have shifted their thinking towards a more integrated approach to social responsibility.
One of these is Tracker South Africa. Its volunteer programmes have become an integral part of the business, with buy-in and support from senior management.
Tshego Bokaba, Tracker Connect CSI manager, said the company had shifted from a loose volunteer programme that allowed employees to contribute to community projects of their own choice to a far more structured programme that is aligned with the company’s corporate values.
“We’ve seen the business benefits of employee volunteering, including a positive impact on corporate reputation, better recruitment possibilities and improved staff retention. Employees take greater pride in the business,” she said.
Bokaba presented Tracker’s Men In The Making (MIM) project as an example of how effectively EV is aligned into the business. Developed in 2009, the MIM initiative is a mentoring programme that helps to channel young boys away from the negative influences of the streets and into career paths of their choice. It empowers and develops boys by exposing them to positive role models, career guidance and the working world, initially within Tracker, and then within companies that are partners in the programme.
Bokaba said the MIM programme grew organically from Tracker’s staff complement, which is largely male. It is widely supported by the staff and receives support from the department of basic education, in line with the government’s Boy Education Movement school programme.
“We now have participation from more than 130 corporates and government departments, including South African corporates such as MTN, FirstRand Group divisions (Ashburton, FCC, FNB, RMB, WesBank), PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Hollard, the department of energy, MWeb and Transnet.
“The Tracker MIM initiative is more than just one day in the life of a corporate — it’s about a long-term commitment by business to those less fortunate, and the benefits for all parties concerned, including the bottom line of the companies involved, are enormous,” she said.
After active working group discussions and a feedback session, the workshop was closed by Storey, who pointed out that business leaders can play a significant role by influencing the positioning and implementation of employee volunteering.
The mission of the Beyond Painting Classrooms programme is to build a developmental employee volunteering practice that contributes to shared value creation for business and society. The second BPC conference will be held in September in Johannesburg.
http://www.firstrand.co.za/csi/volunteers/Pages/beyond-painting-classrooms.aspx