AVPN Roadshow 2013 Mumbai Topical Readings Philanthropy: India Inc encourages employees to volunteer for community service

The Economic Times, Ahona Ghosh, ET Bureau Apr 15, 2011, 06.13am IST MUMBAI: When Subhayu Mishra, vice president and head of corporate communications at Barclays India, walked into the bank on his first day at work, colleagues demanded Rs 5,000 from him. Three days later, when he had the money, Mishra learnt what it was for: Prosthetic limbs for two people from the village of Wade, 80 km from Mumbai. At Barclays, this is just one of many volunteering initiatives employees support. For two months from November 2008, 70 of the bank's employees took turns to visit Burjwadi in Karjat, to oversee a new sanitation project that would feed a cluster of seven villages. Working Sundays, they have built 165 toilets in the area, one for each household. This year, Barclays employees picked a project that would try and check the spread of dengue in Delhi's Tughlakabad area. They also began running literacy programmes for women on the side in the area. Barclays is not the only one encouraging employees to participate in community projects. More and more companies are going beyond opening their pursestrings, to insist that their employees give of their time too. They want their staff to get in the trenches, whether it is to build toilets, teach underprivileged children, adopt orphanages or look to the needs of tribal communities. Shalabh Sahai, director of iVolunteer, a platform that connects individuals who want to volunteer their time with non-profit organisations, says when he introduced the idea of employee volunteering in 2004, most corporate houses were not interested . It took him five years to just get the programme going. "We thought employee volunteering would take off in a big way since most companies already had payroll giving and donation options in place," says Sahai. "But the corporate sector was clearly not ready then." However, it is now. Banks like Standard Chartered Bank, HSBC and Citibank ; IT companies IBM, Infosys, Wipro, Genpact and Adobe Systems; and many other companies, like Hindustan Unilever, JP Morgan, the Tata Group and ICICI Prudential, have anywhere between 200 to several thousand employees committing hundreds of hours to various projects . Nasscom Foundation, the social responsibility wing of Nasscom, has enlisted about 25,000 employees from 17 member-organisations to work on projects under its volunteering initiative, My Kartavya. Next month, says Foundation senior manager Prashant Pandit, the number will touch one lakh employees, with four or five more companies having signed on recently. "Employee volunteering is the easiest way to do CSR," says Pandit. "Earlier, 1

it was just a blood donation drive or plant-atree day. Today we are excited about offering long-term projects to employees with a minimum, six-month timeline." Besides community work, companies use this as an opportunity to teach their employees a lesson in leadership and project management skills. "From a human resources perspective, volunteering provides an employee engagement platform for staff across departments to interact with each other. For the company, it is also a branding and loyalty exercise," adds Pandit. Most of them also encourage feedback from their non-profit partners, to assess the impact of the volunteering and CSR work they undertake. According to Noshir H Dadrawala, CEO of the Centre for Advancement of Philanthropy, for most companies, "volunteering is about doing it because others are. Every company likes to show, in its annual report, that it is a good corporate citizen. Few understand the value of such programmes. But they are having to learn now because employees today are also choosy. They like to be associated with companies that have a 'caring and sharing' image. Moreover, like the company, every employee also likes to show a degree of social commitment and experience on his or her CV." That might well be the motivator for 350 of Barclays India employees (out of a country strength of 1,239) who willingly participate in multiple, timeconsuming but satisfying projects. For instance, the prosthetic limbs project in Wade has helped about 225 people, "mostly tribals who hadn't walked for the past 15 years," says Sai Krishna, senior portfolio manager with the Emerging Corporate Group at Barclays. "Some of them can now go to work and earn wages; they have got a new lease of life." In Tughlakabad, Barclays' Delhi team and its NGO partner, Smile Foundation, have certainly been able to increase awareness about dengue. At Standard Charted, about 1,300 employees from the bank's Group Technology and Operations (GTO) recently partnered with Naz Foundation in Mumbai to support education for women by adopting four girls' schools. The employees teach the girls about life skills and HIV awareness, besides mathematics, English and Marathi and take some vocational courses as well"There is always a shortage of teachers, so we prepared a roster, for a three to six-month period, where each of us take classes at these schools," says Robert Menezes, human resources manager at Standard Chartered. The team has clocked over 2,600 man hours for volunteering activities over 2,200 days. "The bank gives us three days a year of paid leave for volunteering," adds Menezes. Good work aside, employee volunteering has a definite impact on the business of the company. For instance, Hindustan Unilever's Sustainable Living Plan is about integrating community engagement practices with the business itself. "If community awareness about issues like hygiene, environmental conservation and health, increases, the sales of our products is bound to rise too," says Sameer Nagarajan, general manager, Employee Relations at HUL. The company kicked off its employee volunteering programme, christened 'HUL Sankalp', in 2008, to coincide with 75 years of HUL's existence in India.

"Employees committed to volunteer one hour for every day that HUL has been in the country," adds Nagarajan. That year, over 6,000 employees put in 49,609 hours of volunteering; last year, they increased that tally by an additional 7,948 hours. "Every HUL employee, starting with our CEO Nitin Paranjpe, has volunteered quite a few hours," says Nagarajan. "And whatever volunteering activity we do, we make sure it has some connect with our business." Like the campaign on hygiene that HUL the manufacturer of a host of personal care products conducted in Mumbai's Dharavi slum. Business sense or not, employee volunteering, in many cases, goes beyond tokenism, says Dadrawala. "Loaning executives to help NGOs with streamlining finance, improve communications or marketing is of far greater value than financial grants," he adds. "Employees can not only add value to an NGO's programme, but also teach in communities, impart skills, create awareness and generally reach out to do some good.

Volunteer to Employee: Mamtha Sharma, Head Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs, IBM India By Mamtha Sharma, SEP 27 http://www.desicorps.com/csr/volunteer-employee-mamtha-sharma-headcorporate-citizenship-corporate-affairs-ibm-india/ Do you aspire to contribute to the betterment of the society through community service or social work? This very experience can also equip you with career skills and teach you a lesson or two in workplace dynamics A few years earlier, the term or concept of skill-based volunteerism was an unknown entity to most corporates and citizens. The idea started taking shape when employers realised that the best asset they have at their disposal for community service was their employees, and all that it takes to leverage the maximum out of them, is to have the right person do the right job, at the right time. Connecting the volunteer with the right skills to the right job, resulted in a stronger relationship between the volunteer and the non-profit sector ensuring maximum impact. Since the inception of this concept, it has benefited all stakeholders be it employees, employers, non-profits or the direct community that now have access to experts who would genuinely work towards their development rather than mandatory community service. Sectors like education, healthcare and hygiene benefit from this pro-bono volunteerism as they attract experts from corporations to help them. Also, what needs to be emphasised is the knowledge-transfer that happens in this process first from the employee to the NGO and then from the NGO to the employee. The young millennials, increasingly the workforce that constitutes a majority in workplaces, are the ones looking to do meaningful work and creating an impact a social impact that will associate their work with a larger cause for the betterment of the society. Discussions of the benefits of volunteerism typically focus on the impact such programmes yield for their non-profit beneficiaries, but perhaps more deserving of attention is the way such programmes develop leadership talent within volunteers themselves. Employees who lead, and are experts in talent development are priceless to the company and pro-bono volunteer work creates this corps of employees who has great potential to impact the decisions they make on behalf of their company in the future years. Employees get a great chance to enter and work in the emerging markets of the world, where they learn the lessons about the complexity of issues facing the developing world and how to begin introducing solutions to diverse challenges in such operative situations. Skill-based volunteerism also helps develop a work culture that is very global in nature something that todays young millennial aspires to. Another important aspect of this is skill development. Many volunteers say they do not realise they had 4

a particular skill till they started volunteering. It helps in rediscovering themselves, when they find themselves in a different environment. Not only this, volunteers also learn one of the greatest lessons in life adaptability in a new environment and solving problems while considering possibilities that concern the entire mankind, lessons which they do not forget as they migrate back to their offices with this global adaptive leadership mindset. Skill-based volunteerism opens up an entire gamut of opportunities, challenges and risks involved with the markets where they and their clients operate, both in the developed world and developing nations. These volunteers learn from each other; a very critical part of the entire experience encompasses knowledge-transfer within the team, on a project, with each other. - Mamtha Sharma, Head, corporate citizenship and corporate affairs, IBM India