Why Volunteering Should Be a Workplace Right

The modern workplace is evolving and as I see it, every step of this seems to reinforce the value of workplace volunteering. 

The switch to more remote working makes it all the more important to bring people together in meaningful ways, such as through team volunteering. The concern for employee well-being also puts volunteering centre-stage, as the only intervention by employers that is in fact proved to work. 

Volunteering is about giving back but it is also about getting back. Encouraging talent and developing skills in staff teams brings volunteering in as a form of learning by experience, with particular benefits in terms of nurturing the ‘of skills-based volunteering for the employer, according to research by Pro Bono Economics is for every £1 spent setting it up, to deliver up to £3.60 of business benefits. Pro Bono Economics is for every £1 spent setting it up, to deliver up to £3.60 of business benefits.

At the same time, the Boardroom emphasis on business culture and purpose makes practical partnerships with purpose-rich charities of more potential benefit to business as well as to the charity.

Workplace volunteering is on the agenda.

A ‘right to request’ and the rise of flexible working

If there is one word which characterises these underlying changes in the workplace over the last decade, it is ‘flexibility’. Work is demanding of people to be flexible and adaptive, but equally people are demanding of work that it gives them more choice and flexibility. 

Young people joining the labour market today talk of ‘working with’ a business rather than ‘working for’, a healthy change of attitude from the tradition, as folk singer Ewan McColl put it long ago, of being a free man on Sunday and a wage slave from Monday. 

This shift to more flexible working is one that has been embraced across the society and across politicians too. So, just as there has been cross-party consensus in favour since the introduction of the ‘right to request’ flexible working in the UK, I suggest that whoever forms the next Government ought to extend this logic to consider a new right: the right to request volunteering time.

Under the rules introduced in 2014, employees have a legal right to request to work flexibly. The employer has to respond, but it doesn’t have to agree. It needs to work for both the individual and the business. It is a simple and beautiful nudge, empowering staff and with zero burden on the business. 

In the five years since the right was introduced, there was a four-percentage point increase, up to 27% in the proportion of the workforce using flexible working. By 2019, that was an additional 1.2 million people who benefited. Finding new ways to work in the context of the pandemic simply accelerated this underlying paradigm change in working patterns. The CIPD report that three out of five (60%) workers now have flexible working arrangements.

So, where does volunteering fit in this?

I’m pleased to report that volunteering is in the public eye. The Big Help Out is a national campaign to encourage all forms of volunteering and over the last weekend, companies and charities have worked together to promote volunteering. Asda encouraged its staff to get involved in over 350 litter picks across the UK. Staff from Compare the Market have volunteered at the Brixton Soup Kitchen and Hackney Foodbank. DPD staff have been planting trees and helping out with canal and beach clean-up events.

To hard-pressed charities, all volunteers are welcome, but increasingly the emphasis in workplace volunteering is on skills-based volunteering. According to data from the voluntary sector network NCVO, skills-based volunteering, where individuals use their professional, occupational and specialist skills to support charities, has risen by 20% since 2019.

This makes sense. Team volunteering outings in the past, whether painting community halls or an afternoon gardening, have garnered a bad name in the charity world. I have visited a hospice in the Midlands where the fence was painted once a month by corporate volunteers, while stories abound of charities having to pay to get things done properly after the volunteers had left. 

Seven out of ten small and medium-sized charities say that they are actively looking for pro bono professional skills to support what they do — but only four out of ten find it. Why get accountants for example to do gardening, when their professional skills are of far greater value for charities?

Lloyds Bank Foundation released a report this week on their experience of skills-based volunteering and it is a positive one, echoing the findings of Pro Bono Economics for Pilotlight that there is a triple dividend from skills-based volunteering, as “it can help employees' wellbeing; support higher productivity for employers; and help charities to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing society.”

Workplace volunteering, for example, is a powerful driver for a more inclusive economy. According to research by Pilotlight, those who volunteer with the support of their employer are around twice as likely to be people of the Global Majority as the population at large (23% compared to 12%). 

Data for the UK Pro Bono Association, a network of skilled volunteering organisations, by Cranfield Trust, Pilotlight and Reach, suggests that skilled volunteers helped to support 8,300 voluntary organisations last year. Members of the Association include charities promoting skills-based volunteering such as Charterpath, DataKind UK, Digital Candle, Getting on Board, ICAEW, Inspiring Scotland, Kilfinan Trust, LandAid, LawWorks, MarketingKind, Media Trust, Pro Bono Economics, Scottish Tech Army, Sported, the OR Society and Whitehall and Industry Group. 

But there is a challenge for workplace volunteering, which is that many workplaces simply do not recognise, let alone promote the option. According to Pro Bono Economics, 17 - 23 million employees do not currently have access to workplace volunteering.

The economic benefits of tackling this are huge. Expanding workplace volunteering opportunities to cover all employees in the UK, Pro Bono Economics report could generate billions in economic gains (£1.2 billion - £3.6 billion per year in wellbeing benefits to individuals, £1.6 billion - £2.8 billion per year in improved net productivity).

Furthermore, ensuring all employees have access to volunteering opportunities could save between 1.4 million and 2.5 million working days of sickness absence. Workplace volunteering therefore has the potential to boost productivity, improve employees’ wellbeing, and generate billions for the UK economy. 

A right to request volunteering

This is why I am a passionate supporter of a leading policy recommendation for all the political parties in the coming General Election to introduce a right to request for volunteering. 

This is a campaign recommendation that is championed by the Voluntary Sector Manifesto, co-created by NCVO with the voluntary sector leadership network, ACEVO. The manifesto argues for the introduction of a right to request paid leave for volunteering and enable reasonable time off for trustee duties, noting that school governors are already entitled to time off work.  

As with the right to request, this is about giving confidence to workers to raise this with their employer. According to our data, around six million people (21% of the workforce) are putting their work skills into use on a voluntary basis and a further 50% would like to volunteer using their occupational or professional skills. Rather than leave it to employees to take action on their own, the majority view is that employers should be taking steps to help employees around options for volunteering (60% of those who expressed a view). Over a third (38%) say they needed guidance on how to do this. 

These are the barriers that a right to request would lift, prompting employers to respond without obliging them to agree. Overcoming a current inertia in many workplaces, employers are more likely to respond if they see business benefits in terms of staff development in doing so. Of those currently involved in skills-based volunteering, 79% believe that businesses themselves benefit from the practice. 

Introducing a right to request volunteering is not a complex policy ask. Measures such as this would call for appropriate consultation and be subject to the usual analysis all business legislation faces around costs and benefits. But it would not necessarily need new primary legislation. And it would in effect cost no public money to implement. All the technical work around a right to request volunteering has already been put into place for the right to request flexible working, including eligibility and process, including listing eight permitted business reasons under which employers can refuse requests. 

The simple way to proceed might therefore be to test whether workplace volunteering requests would be considered as a valid form of flexible working request, in which case the policy action is to communicate that this right exists, or failing this, to introduce a Statutory Instrument that clarifies and widens the scope of the right to request to include workplace volunteering.  

Volunteering is at the heart of a free, convivial and inclusive society. Workplace volunteering is of proven benefit to all involved, a win-win-win.  

It is time for policy to align with what is working well for so many workplaces and extend the option to others. It is a time to make volunteering a workplace right. 

24th June 2024