OPINION
November / December 2008
Employee-Driven Community Involvement Creates Opportunities to Learn, Grow, & Build
By Scott Stoppler, President
Executrade
Community involvement is a growing trend in the business world. From small businesses to larger corporations, employers everywhere are spearheading community involvement initiatives. But can employees also take the lead? Absolutely! More and more employees are driving initiatives on behalf of their company. In leading these initiatives, they create new opportunities for themselves and their company to learn, grow, and build.
Community involvement helps employees learn how to work together more efficiently in a setting that is external to their jobs. Employees learn more about their co-workers, the way they work, and the best ways to work with them. Community work fosters natural and cohesive team-building and a sense of company-wide camaraderie. This, in turn, enhances the internal corporate culture and employee loyalty to the team. Moreover, community work helps employees feel involved in their company. In small or medium companies, employees are in an ideal position to help decide how the company will get involved in the community. For example, consider the employees at Incite Solutions Inc., a small marketing firm in Edmonton. They decided as a group to focus on breast cancer to support a co-worker who was recently diagnosed. They chose to get involved with two local events: the CIBC Run for the Cure and Compassion House’s “Fashion with Compassion” luncheon.
For the run, they entered a team of employees, family, and friends. To support this initiative, Incite offered to cover each employee’s registration fees, and as a team, they raised over $7,000 for cancer research. After the run, Incite hosted a pizza lunch to celebrate everyone’s efforts. A couple weeks later, the group volunteered for a full day at the Fashion with Compassion fashion show luncheon as raffle-ticket sellers for the prize auction portion. Fashion with Compassion is a fundraiser for Sorrentino’s Compassion House, a facility which supports women with breast cancer. Again, Incite supported the employees’ efforts by paying them their regular day’s wages while they volunteered. These activities strengthened the company’s corporate culture because the employees came together as a group to support a fellow co-worker and a cause they all cared about.
Community involvement is a great activity for employees because it fosters individual and company growth. An employee’s confidence tends to grow because community involvement often requires a “can-do” attitude, rather than a “cannot” one. Typically, employees will use their current skills or develop new ones when they help out in the community. In an article penned by Jared Larrabee, senior consultant at Deloitte Touche Consulting LLP, he states, “Volunteering gives employees the opportunity to develop business skills, such as problem-solving, teaming, motivating others, and achieving results.” Employees can grow and become more valuable, productive workers through the increased confidence and employable skills that they develop.
When they help their companies get more involved, employees build the foundation and momentum for long-term future initiatives. For example, community involvement may become an integral part of the corporate culture, especially if the company is smaller and has not been involved before. Employees start to build more solid, long-term relationships with the community. Eventually, they may need to create a formal program or committee to manage these relationships and initiatives. A classic example of how community involvement can turn into something more is the employee-driven Employees Care by Helping Others (ECHO) program at Winnipeg’s Manitoba Lotteries Corporation (MLC). According to an April 26, 2006 media release issued by MLC, ECHO originated from a group of employees who had read about young heart surgery patients needing special equipment in a 2005 Winnipeg Free Press article. The group decided that they would raise the money to help purchase this equipment. To do this, they created a charitable network called ECHO.
The MLC website explains that “Through ECHO, MLC employees support a Charity of Choice program which provides funding assistance of up to $100,000 to registered Canadian charities based in Manitoba for capital projects...” Using ECHO, they raised $25,000 of the total $100,000 in four months for the Children’s Hospital Foundation (ECHO’s first Charity of Choice). Meanwhile, MLC supported the employee-driven initiative through matching donations. The group successfully raised all of the money in just 18 months. Today, ECHO is still administered entirely by employees on a voluntary basis.
By driving community involvement for their companies, employees—like the ones at Incite and MLC—are creating opportunities for themselves and their companies to learn, grow, and build. Their contributions help foster enhanced team dynamics within the corporate culture. While leading the company’s community initiatives, employees grow as individuals, developing skills that can be applied at work and in life. Finally, employee leadership can help the company build stronger relationships with the community, and in the end, this is what employee-driven community involvement is really all about.
Materials Sourced:
Employee Charity of Choice: Echo & Echo’s Charity of Choice, Manitoba Lotteries Corporation, www.mlc.mb.ca
