Tag Archives: amanda bowman

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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September 30, 2011 · 4:57 pm

Clinton Global Initiative’s Top Five Trends in Employee Engagement

By Amanda Bowman, IBLF

Wow. New York was busy last week. Capitalising on the UN General Assembly meetings, many other organisations took the opportunity to bring people together to forward their agendas. IBLF was involved with several events – the UN Private Sector Forum, The Global Business Coalition on Health, a Business Call to Action private breakfast, the UN High-Level Forum on non-communicable diseases and of course the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting.

I was one of the IBLF team in town, and my focus was with the CGI Annual Meeting – where over 1200 attendees took part in and three days of plenaries, leadership lunches, breakouts, Action Network meetings, and insightful group discussions.

There’s no denying that the line up was impressive. Under President Bill Clinton’s strong leadership throughout the week, we were led through three tracks on Jobs, Sustainable Consumption and Girls and Women. The scene was set on Day 1 with a Leaders Dialogue on Climate Change featuring President Clinton interviewing heads of state from Bangladesh, Grenada, Iceland, Mali, Mexico, Norway, Slovenia and South Africa on how climate change can help to create jobs, build new industries and strengthen economic and ecological systems around the world.

People come to CGI for different reasons – some to learn, some to share and some to find new partners. My main focus for the week was to host the CGI Pathways to Employee Engagement Action Network meeting (falling under their ‘Sustainable Consumption: Ensuring Long-term Prosperity on a Finite Planet’ strand). The Network meets virtually throughout the year, and I co-lead on it with Gary Grates from Edelman. Deirdre White from CDC Development Solutions worked with us to lead the meeting for some of the 80 or so regular participants of the Network together with Annual Meeting participants interested in our topic. Attendees shared both what works for them and their concerns around employee engagement.

From our end, we shared some of the most recent trends in employee engagement featuring results from Edelman’s Rethinking Employee Engagement , CDC Development Solutions’ International Corporate Volunteering Benchmarking Survey and IAVE’s Global Corporate Volunteering Project. Here are the Top Five:

 1. Rethinking Employee Engagement states that only one in five workers are giving full discretionary effort to their job. At the same time, companies with highly engaged employees outperform the total stock market and enjoyed total shareholder returns at 19% higher than the average in 2009, while those with low engagement levels saw total shareholder returns stand at 44% lower than the average.

2. An Edelman study of 30 MNCs found that some defined employee engagement in emotional terms – satisfaction, pride and motivation. Others acknowledged that employee engagement is necessary but elusive especially in tough times.

3. The CGI Action Network definition for employee engagement builds on the above – “To leverage the positive benefits achieved from a strong relationship between the company and its employees in order to derive greater employee discretionary effort in achieving the organization’s objectives”. We focus activity on employee community engagement and leverage the opportunities for employee engagement to deliver to business, employee and society needs.

4. The CDC Development Solutions (CDS) benchmark survey explored companies’ experience of employee community engagement programmes where employees cross international borders and provide services based primarily on the skills used in their day jobs. The number of programmes of this kind have grown from 6 programmes in 2006 to 21 in 2011, and participating employees from 280 employees in 2006 to almost 2,000 in 2011.

5. The CDS survey confirmed that the greatest benefit cited by companies are of employee skills development with local community benefit, meeting CSR objectives, HR benefits and research and development.

These results were endorsed by the IAVE research that highlighted seven key learnings including that employee community engagement is being used as a strategic asset to help achieve business goals and the importance of sustained and consistent measurement and evaluation.

Was it worth it and would I go again? Yes please. I’ve returned home inspired with several new ideas for my work, for our CGI Action Network and lots of anecdotes to share.

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