Employee volunteering makes good business sense

By Nicole Sykes, Director of Communications and Policy

From boardroom meditation sessions to healthy snack carts, schemes to improve employee wellbeing have proliferated over the past half-decade. But the worrying truth is that many businesses do not approach wellbeing initiatives with the same hard-headed evidence that they apply to other areas of their organisation.  

Employers have good reason to reach for wellbeing solutions. Workforce sickness levels have skyrocketed. Not only have the number of days lost to sickness reached 186 million – a record high. But 2.7 million working age people are out of work due to long-term sickness, and nearly two-fifths of those people have five or more health conditions, making returning to work a complex challenge.  

Overall, sickness absence is thought to cost UK businesses £24 billion a year - roughly equivalent to the GDP generated by Newcastle. Add in the estimated £24-28 billion cost of presenteeism, where employees turn up to work despite being too sick, and it’s not hard to understand why employers are grasping for solutions. While some sickness is inevitable, improving wellbeing can help reduce the impact and prevalence of some sickness leave and presenteeism. But when evidence shows that popular initiatives like resilience classes and mindfulness programs can do more harm than good, businesses may need to change tack. 

The initiative with the strongest evidence base for making a difference is actually workplace volunteering – where employers use policies and processes to support their employees to participate in volunteering during work time. There is a wealth of data showing that volunteering makes employees healthier, lowers their risk of depression, and increases their level of engagement in the workplace. This in turn supports higher productivity for employers, and helps charities to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing society. 

Whether providing individuals with volunteering hours so they can be trustees, or organising whole team volunteering with a charity, workplace volunteering can significantly improve employee wellbeing. In fact, taking part in workplace volunteering makes such a difference that it reduces employee absence by 0.9 days per year on average. Pro Bono Economics calculates that, were workplace volunteering rolled out to all staff who do not currently have access to it in the UK, it could save between 1.4 million and 2.5 million working days of sickness absence.  

Strong alignment between organisational purpose and the volunteer cause can increase the likelihood of employee participation. Rail companies often partner with Samaritans, and beauty businesses often volunteer with charities focused on hygiene poverty, because employees already have an interest or value alignment. The companies which have the highest uptake often go as far as to linking social action to individuals’ objectives and performance. 

And the benefits don’t stop at wellbeing. Driving up the numbers of employees who volunteer is likely to have benefits for productivity, building skills, confidence and positive sentiment about employers. Studies suggest that the productivity impact of workplace volunteering is significant, with high-skilled individuals who volunteer experiencing an estimated £2,300 earnings boost on average. Scaling up these efforts to all employees could lead to a gross productivity gain of £2.2 billion to £3.9 billion.  

Of course, such a surge in volunteering would also benefit society. If the 17 to 23 million employees believed to lack access to workplace volunteering suddenly started to put their hands up, the charities which are crying out for extra help would be delighted – providing volunteering is offered in the right way. Foodbanks, youth groups and community sports organisations alike are regularly saying that their biggest worry is a lack of volunteers.  

To squeeze the most concentrated benefits out of workplace volunteering, employers have to put in the work and lead by example. Businesses should consider the causes that most align with their purpose, and they should make time for volunteering during the working day.  

But the effort is worth it. Because the data shows doing good really does makes your employees feel good.