Companies Underestimate Benefits of Employee Volunteer Programs, Report Says

Volunteering programs that use and hone skills are an effective and inexpensive professional-development tool, according to a national survey of human-resource managers, yet few companies regularly integrate employee training needs into volunteer activities.

In a survey of human-resource managers at 250 randomly selected Fortune 500 companies — conducted in February by Deloitte, a network of financial consulting firms with headquarters in New York — 91 percent of respondents agreed that volunteering at a nonprofit organization “can be an effective way to develop business skills.”

However, only 16 percent of companies surveyed had a system to promote volunteer opportunities that allowed employees to offer business expertise and further their own professional development.

Additionally, most volunteer opportunities that develop leadership skills were only offered to managers and executives, as opposed to all employees, the study found.

“With a focus on learning and development, a volunteer role can be a stretch assignment that develops leadership and client-service skills that benefit the volunteer organization, the employee, and their company,” said Susan Burnett, Deloitte’s national director of talent development, in a statement.

Eighty-seven percent of human-resource managers said that their companies’ employee-development programs are expected to develop the next set of leaders.

Marrying volunteer programs with professional-development efforts may make financial sense in tough economic times, posits the study, as just two percent of human-resource managers thought that weaving the two programs together would be more expensive than a traditional development program.

The “2008 Deloitte Volunteer Impact Survey,” as well as other studies in the company’s annual volunteer research series, is available free on the group’s Web site.