Three Hands > News > HR Zone
Volunteering is good news
for HR Directors
From HR Zone, October 2005
Opportunities to help out in the community are becoming as big a pull for candidates as salary and flashy benefits; Leo Martin explains the allure of helping out in the local environment.
Developing people, recruiting the best new staff and keeping staff turnover low has been a vital part of business success for years. Personal and professional development of employees is considered to be of obvious benefit in most workplaces.
But while traditional classroom training has become less fashionable, learning by experience is now commonplace. Indeed, taking a team, or a collection of individuals, out of the workplace and into an unfamiliar and sometimes uncomfortable setting is an established way of building teams, testing individuals’ personal attributes and developing skills such as communications, project management and leadership.
Classic methods include acting out disaster scenarios (from the comfort
of a hotel suite), orienteering in deepest, darkest Wales and raft-building
in the Lake District.
What is interesting is the newly emerging industry of linking training
with corporate community involvement. The experience of volunteers in
the community has in many instances given good and unexpected feedback
to HR directors about the benefit of volunteering. Taking this a stage
further, some companies are looking to use the volunteering type experiences
as much more of a formal training opportunity.
This new type of structured training programme in the community has been
labelled ‘socially responsible development’ (SRD) by one organisation
that we have come across during our assessments. This organisation (called
Three Hands) has developed training programmes based around corporate
community investment and involvement activities. The argument put forward
by them is that this type of training works because it puts people in
a real life setting, where the results really matter.
For example a team from Pfizer went on a week’s training in Scotland.
But instead of building a raft and sailing away the team had to raise
at least £7,500 to pay for 25 ‘Hospital Playboxes’ (to
enable children to role-play going into hospital), to deliver those Playboxes
to remote hospitals in Scotland and Northern Ireland by public transport
and to raise media awareness of the charity at every opportunity.
Unlike the case of the raft, which will be dismantled at the end of the
course, the results really matter. And because the results matter, the
training is rated highly by the participants.
In the case of the Pfizer team, they managed to raise £15,000, delivered
all of the Playboxes and raised awareness of the charity so that it experienced
a noticeable increase in enquiries. At the same time, the team did a huge
amount to address their own learning objectives in areas such as leadership,
planning and analytical thinking.
So is the era of raft-building dead and buried? Not just yet it seems.
Theoretical outdoor exercises will no doubt remain popular. However, the
SRD concept, while still quite new, is without doubt compelling. Many
employees state that the chance to do something useful in the community
is one of the strongest ‘feel-good’ factors that attracts
them to their employer.
In another piece of assessment work in Mexico we found a car parts factory
that was training young homeless people to be motor mechanics. They took
employees from the factory to help with the training and education about
the motor-parts and their technical performance. It was noticeable how
many times, employees cited their involvement in this scheme as the best
reason to work at the company.
These types of programmes are good news for HR directors who, like other senior managers, are under pressure to both innovate and to try to build in corporate responsibility into their work.
Leo Martin is director and founder of GoodCorporation, the corporate responsibility standard and is the principal character in the BBC’s series, Good Company, Bad Company.
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