Three Tips to Drive Volunteerism in Your Company

By Tina Morefield, AT&T

For many companies, large and small, community service is ingrained in the culture. AT&T is no different.  For more than 100 years, we have been donating our time and talents to support underserved populations and strengthen our communities. Thanks to platforms like VolunteerMatch, we have been able to strengthen our community engagement programs to help achieve even greater results.

During my presentation at the 2015 VolunteerMatch Summit, I illustrated how we’re providing opportunities for employees to make a positive impact on the communities where they live and work. Here are a few of our best practices:

1. Equipping and empowering employees to serve locally: We know each employee is motivated to volunteer in different ways and VolunteerMatch allows them to discover and engage in opportunities in their communities focused on causes they care most about. This helped make it possible for us to launch Your Community Day last year, a program that provides management employees with eight hours of paid time off each year to volunteer at a non-profit of their choice. While this program is still new, we hope it will provide incentive to help expand and elevate volunteer opportunities posted on VolunteerMatch and continue increasing engagement among employees.
2. Tracking employee hours: Accurately and easily tracking employee hours is critical to ensuring progress and recognizing individual employees and business units. Through VolunteerMatch, employees who organize volunteer events or who lead causes within our 12 Employee Resource Groups are able to create events and track volunteerism at their group level. We’re also able to create internal reports that can make this employee data beneficial to managers in various business units.
3. Recognizing and incentivizing: By tracking employee hours, we are also able to recognize employees for their outstanding commitment to service. One of the key honors awarded to our employees is the Presidential Volunteer Service Award (PVSA), a prestigious honor awarded annually by the President of the United States in recognition of sustained volunteer service of more than 100 hours in a single year. In 2014, 4,512 AT&T employees received the PVSA for volunteering more than 100 hours, and many volunteered more than 500 hours. And, just last year, we created an international volunteer award to recognize employees around the world who stand out among their peers.

Whether you’re organizing small volunteer opportunities or looking to promote programs within your company, we’ve found these tips will better facilitate local volunteerism and equip your company to incentivize and recognize employees. To learn more about community engagement at AT&T, visit our Connect To Good hub.