Do you have multiple employees within your municipal organization who give back to your community through volunteering with nonprofits? If so, April is their month, and if you don’t have an employee volunteer program (EVP), it’s the perfect time to do it.
National Volunteer Month has expanded since President Nixon created National Volunteer Week in 1974, giving organizations ample opportunity to acknowledge the work done by its volunteers and by employees who participate in volunteering. EVPs are a great way for organizations to engage their employees and to make positive contributions to their communities.
When you are a government entity, however, building an EVP can be complicated. Because you are serving a community as well as working with diverse employees, you have to be careful about the partnerships your EVP chooses to form. How then do you build an EVP that has the greatest impact for your employees and your community?
Plan Well
When I worked at a city government entity, I was asked to work on its EVP, as I was a long-time grassroots volunteer. One of the first decisions we had to make was figuring out the regulations about volunteer time for our employees.
Because we operated by state and federal guidelines for our payroll and time management, we couldn’t offer paid time off as compensation for volunteer work completed during the workweek. Most government entities operate similarly, so check the United States Office of Personnel Management’s guidelines regarding volunteering.
While this may limit what you can offer as compensation, it will also give you a framework for planning your EVP, including ways to recognize your employees’ work. Since you likely cannot offer PTO for you employees, supervisors and HR departments must make every effort to accommodate requests for scheduled use of vacation days and comp time for EVP participation.
Use Their Skills
Another possible limitation for municipalities is forming a long-term partnership with one or two nonprofits in a community. While this sort of long-term partnership has potential for deeper connections, it could also lead to alienating employees and constituents. Forging partnerships with more than one nonprofit is a better model for involving your organization in the community.
It’s easy to go about this by building a skills-based volunteer program. The skills-based model centers on the concept that volunteers should give their time to causes that can best use their personal and professional skills.
In the EVP I helped create, our legal department volunteered with community justice programs. The building department worked with Habitat for Humanity, and the Parks and Rec department did extra environmental clean-ups.
The EVP should also encourage employees to volunteer individually based on their skills. If there’s one employee whose passion and skills are information technology focused, your EVP coordinators should find a nonprofit at which she can use those skills to do the most good. She could teach coding at a youth center or repair donated hardware for a local school.
Recognize Their Efforts
While you are obviously unlikely to offer monetary rewards for volunteerism, there are many ways to recognize the efforts of EVP participants. Being asked to help build an EVP is often a great start at showing employees you know they’re helping improve the community.
Integrating EVP recognition into the Human Resource reward program is a great way to make volunteer acknowledgement nearly effortless. It will become second nature to offer a Volunteer Spotlight in regular employee communications, or offer spontaneous kudos to an employee who ran a 5K over the weekend and raised money for a local charity.
Don’t forget to share the efforts of your employees with the public. Not only does this encourage more employees to volunteer, it shows your constituency the wide range of contributions your organization is making. Use those social media channels to share the homes the Building department is creating and the rivers Parks and Rec is cleaning. This publicity is as much about showing off as it is appreciating what your employees are doing.
A well-planned municipal EVP will benefit employees, nonprofits, and the community as a whole. How will your build yours?
