Category Archives: Employee Engagement

January 9, 2012 · 6:17 pm

10 Steps to Success in International Corporate Volunteering

By Amanda Bowman, IBLF

In Part 1 of this blog, I looked at how 2011 had been a good year for International Corporate Volunteering (ICV).  We define ICV as being one distinct form of employee community engagement – placing employees in foreign country assignments and contributing their skills to support the improvement of communities, social organisations or solutions to specific challenges.

Companies report that ICV programmes provide a high impact intervention. However, it is clear that these programmes also demand a significant level of support in project scoping, management, partnership development and evaluation.  And so for many companies, ICV remains an important but small part of an overall community engagement or corporate volunteering approach.

Despite the challenges, more and more companies want their share of the benefits of this employee community engagement and are setting up ICV programmes.

IBLF’s 10 Steps to ICV Success come from working with and learning from companies and their community partners.  They are worth considering if you are thinking about setting up your own ICV programme in 2012.  They will help to ensure that anything you create, or build upon, has more chance of effectiveness and impact:

  1. Set tangible, clear and SMART objectives for your ICV programme
  2. Start small – find your internal champion and pilot before rolling out more widely
  3. Allocate appropriate resources to project management
  4. Work with NGOs or social partners that you know well and trust
  5. Develop processes and implementation plans that align with your company culture
  6. Scope and plan assignments with as much detail as possible to ensure that everyone involved knows what is expected of them
  7. Seeing is believing – talk to people who have already established ICV programmes to learn from their experience and take senior colleagues to visit your programme assignments to inspire them and create ambassadors
  8. Communicate, communicate, communicate – internally and externally
  9. Plan from the beginning for how to measure and evaluate impact on all parties involved
  10. Consider scale at the outset – is this something for a selected few employees or something you want to scale across the organisation?

Interested in learning more about ICV? Have a look at the report Global Companies Volunteering Globally or CDC Development Solutions’ ICV Benchmarking Study – both published during 2011, the International Year of Volunteering +10

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December 18, 2011 · 2:58 pm

International Corporate Volunteering – the HR and CSR teams’ Swiss Army Knife

By Amanda Bowman, IBLF

It’s the end of the European Year of Volunteering and the International Year of Volunteering +10. What impact has this spotlight had on corporate volunteering and in particular, International Corporate Volunteering (ICV)?

Corporate Volunteering is now an important element of companies’ approach to engage employees and recognised as a source of innovation, human resource development and cultural change. The year 2011 has seen a number of companies introduce International Corporate Volunteering (ICV)[1] programmes to leverage employee skills and power up initiatives for new market or supply chain development, and to drive innovation.

Looking at the variety of ways in which ICV is now used, it’s accurate to say that it is fast becoming the ‘Swiss Army Knife’ of a company’s CSR and HR toolbox.

So how is ICV being used as the ‘multi-tool’ to support a company’s efforts within its areas of operation? I’m going to use IBLF ‘s Spheres of Influence model (below) to illustrate.

- Many ICV programmes are designed to demonstrate how the company lives its values and how its leadership recognises the importance of its shared destiny with those communities in which it operates. For instance, Marriott’s volunteer programme “Spirit To Serve Our Communities” helps fulfil the company’s pledge that ‘every community will be a better place to live and work because we are there’ and focuses on areas aligned with their core business, such as readiness for hotel careers.

- ICV is increasingly being used for leadership and skills development at all levels to create a workforce fit for today’s challenges.

- ICV is being used as a valuable tool for market development and to understand customers through the immersion of employees in different – often challenging – settings. Intel’s Education Service Corps programme reaches over 40,000 students and 1,000 teachers. It provides opportunities for stakeholder engagement and Intel then gets feedback on how its products and services are used in the market.

- ICV can also be used for supplier capacity building and to help with developing shared values and standards. Carrefour España’s Commercio Solidario created of a line of Ecuadorian food products for the Spanish market. The project helped farmers create small associations and achieve greater volumes. Carrefour volunteers worked during vacations on product quality improvement and planning and logistics, resulting in regular supply and good sales of product in store.

- 2011 has also seen ICV supporting company efforts in the outer Spheres of Influence. GlaxoSmithKline’s PULSE initiative makes a sustainable difference for communities and patients in need. As the programme focuses primarily on health issues, PULSE Volunteers have been able to use their professional skills to work on strategy, operational development, research, marketing and communications to enable sustainable revenue streams. Another example is that of IBM’s Executive Service Corps which puts top IBM experts on the ground to work with city leaders and make recommendations to support legislation change or build new partnerships.

2011 has seen ICV programmes help to build business; build employees and build companies’ licence to operate.  Not all the examples above are innovations from purely the past year, but the European/International Year has brought a new energy and focus to corporate volunteering and ICV programmes.

The Bottom Line: ICV as a Swiss Army Knife can yield a range of business benefits including leadership and skills development around creativity, adaptability, emotional intelligence, communication – the list is truly limitless….

For more on ICV look out for Part 2, IBLF’s 10 Steps for Success in ICV which will appear on this blog in January

[1] ICV is a form of employee community engagement, where employees are given assignments outside their home country in order to contribute their skills to the improvement of the conditions of communities or social organisations or find solutions to specific challenges.

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November 23, 2011 · 4:04 pm

Four things progressive companies are exploring now

By Clare Melford, CEO

At a recent university reunion event, I met my old tutor. His eyes lit up as I told him about the work we’re doing at IBLF with global business leaders. “Maybe some of them would be willing to be the research subjects of my latest paper,” said the renowned neuroscientist. I asked what it was about. “Hubris syndrome among business leaders,” he replied.

While not completely convinced that this would be a winning sales pitch with IBLF’s network of global CEOs, it did strike me that even in the corridors of academia, business leaders appear to have a bad name right now – and that this is in no one’s interests.

That thought was reinforced by a letter in the Times earlier this month from a range of academics, entitled “Business turn a blind eye to the severe social, economic and environmental difficulties that currently stain our world”. This was signed by such people as Charles Handy as well as a host of business school professors.

While some people dismiss the protests in Wall Street, London and elsewhere as being inchoate and unrealistic, it seems harder to suggest that academics, business schools, the Archbishop of Canterbury as well as protestors around the world are collectively wide off the mark – even if their proposed solutions are not clear.

No one benefits if the only sector that can generate wealth – the business sector – loses its social licence to operate.

And on the basis that holding onto something is far easier than trying to reclaim what is lost, here are four things that we see progressive businesses exploring which go some significant way to demonstrating a listening ear, a caring heart and a far-sighted brain.

1. Some companies are exploring publishing their policy on executive pay and tracking the ratio of the highest to the lowest salary. While companies must be free to compete for top executive talent in the market place, they must also demonstrate concern for their lowest paid employees, and for equity. The continual widening of this ratio cannot be healthy.

2. Some businesses are debating publishing their political donations and lobbying activities. There is a growing sense that for all the good companies may do through their core business or their social responsibility activities, some, behind the scenes, are lobbying governments in ways that are counter to stated public goals. This suspicion fuels the mistrust.

3. Companies are beginning to get on the front foot on publishing their core contribution to social development – the provision of jobs. Not only do companies create jobs directly but the indirect benefit to job creation in suppliers and service providers can be huge, with ratios of 1 direct job to 60 indirect jobs created in the case of Unilever in Indonesia. Companies such as the Coca Cola Company are beginning to publish indirect job creation goals (5mn in this case) as well as their direct job creation plans.

4. The upsurge in attention around the world on the issue of corruption and its pernicious effect on the poor is unlikely to die down, fuelled as it is by better access to information and public understanding of how to use that information. Many companies are now doing all they can to create cultures intolerant to corruption. They are establishing clear procedures internally, signing up to the many anti-bribery conventions, working with organisations such as IBLF on anticorruption measures, and in the case of several Indian companies such as Wipro and Godrej, the business leaders are writing open letters calling on their governments to join the fight to stem the tide of corruption. Such companies will both reduce their risk of being affected by corruption and also demonstrate their desire to root out what ultimately represents a multi trillion dollar waste of money.

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