Employee volunteering schemes may look great on your company website, in your annual reports and recruitment ads – but you’re not increasing your social impact unless people are actually using them.

Research last year showed that the number of organisations offering corporate volunteering schemes is growing, but uptake is still hovering around 15%.

How do we get that figure up – while staying connected with causes and charities to ensure we’re using our time and resources as helpfully as we can?

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Lack of time – or lack of awareness?

Volunteering has moved on a lot in the last few years. We don’t need to take a whole day out of the office to paint a fence any more. There are microvolunteering opportunities that take just minutes, and according to research 51% of employee volunteering opportunities offered are now virtual.

But it’s hard to know what volunteering might look like for you if it’s not modelled or explained well within your organisation. Research tells us employees struggle because they don’t know how to get started with volunteering – 94% of employees say that employers could do more to make them aware of opportunities available. This often happens when schemes are tacked on as an afterthought, and not properly integrated. 

When volunteering is part of company culture – an expected use of time – and there are clear processes in place to help employees access opportunities, that’s where impact happens. And people will always be more invested when they can choose an activity that is meaningful to them – do you know what your employees want to do? Can you engage with them to find out?

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Are you listening to what’s really needed?

We also need to make sure the help is going to the right places, in the right way.

‍York Cares matches the expertise of local employers and their employees to community projects where they can have most impact. Manager Holly Hennell says: “When corporate volunteering becomes a tick-box exercise, everyone loses—communities get mismatched help, employees feel undervalued, and companies miss the deeper impact that comes from meaningful, skills-based engagement. But when volunteer skills and experience are matched with the right community projects, the impact is amplified—projects thrive, volunteers feel fulfilled, and communities see lasting, meaningful change.”

You may find your employees’ time is not best spent weeding a garden after all – unless you’re a gardening firm. It might be about giving a charity access to your in-house business expertise – meaning they benefit from advice and support they wouldn’t normally be able to afford. These relationships are mutually beneficial – your partners benefit from genuinely useful support, and your workforce can potentially gain new skills, and an increased sense of purpose in their work.

Maintaining a good relationship with your beneficiaries can help you track your outcomes too. Feeding the good news back to your workforce will help them see the benefit of volunteering, and should drive even more uptake from colleagues. That 15% will be going up before you know it.

Workers are increasingly looking for purpose in their work (92% of millennials and 89% of Gen Zs consider a sense of purpose in their work to be important for job satisfaction and wellbeing). And charities and voluntary organisations need our help more than ever. It should be a simple equation.

What can your company do better to make sure it adds up – and equals happier people all round?