Community involvement brings positive and measurable change to the communities in which we operate and to our businesses. What makes a community? There is no one answer. For some, a community is a closely connected group of people working towards a common goal. For others, it’s the people you enjoy spending time with. Regardless of your definition of community, there is always one common thread: people.
People make up our offices and the community around us. Our team members are inescapably linked to the groups, and communities around them. As leaders, we can embrace community involvement and help foster a positive, thriving environment at work.
Four reasons why community involvement makes better employees and strengthens your team:
Builds Loyalty
Employees enjoy it when companies incorporate community involvement into the workday. Integration into the community boosts morale and helps create a positive working atmosphere. Teams who frequently participate in workplace volunteer activities are more likely to be proud, loyal, and happy employees. People want to be a part of an organization that gives back. When people work for a company that values their community, you will see impressive loyalty.
Helps Build People Skills
Much like going to a happy hour with colleagues after work, everyone’s guard drops. There is no more talk about projects and reports. Instead, it is people chatting, and it feels good. Whenever you interact with fellow colleagues outside of the constraints of work, you experience them in a brand-new way. In addition, community involvement and volunteering align people around a common cause. Whether you are at a Habitat for Humanity build or a soup kitchen, working together with colleagues in a new environment helps build people skills and kinship at work.
Promotes Leadership
Good leaders are consistently giving their team opportunities to excel. As leaders, our role is to push our team, and if they rise to the challenge, keep giving them opportunities to go further. Stepping outside of our day job and into a volunteer project offers the chance to learn new professional skills while sharpening others. Some of the highly transferable skills that can be strengthened or developed include presentations, public speaking, managing teams, and projects, creating budgets, coordinating events, working with sponsors, fundraising, and mentoring. Chairing a committee can hone leadership skills. Community involvement and volunteering allow for opportunities to test the waters of leadership. If our people can lead efforts in our community, chances are they can excel beyond their current capacity at work, too.
Attracts New Hires
The one employee perk millennials value the most isn’t about getting—it’s about giving. Community involvement helps attract and retain employees in a whole new way. A company’s support for social causes is an important factor in accepting a job offer. The appeal comes not only from the desire to contribute to causes but from the sense that a company that’s involved in doing social good is likely to be a better place to work.
Builds Passion
Everyone has a passion. Your team may be interested in pets, sports, families, or something else. Giving people the opportunity to dig into that passion while in a philanthropic way turns passion into an engagement. When people are given the opportunity to be involved in their passion—whatever it might be—as a volunteer opportunity at work, they are more passionate about their company and their team.
Having an element of community involvement included in your office culture is an important consideration for your team. Community involvement examples can include in-kind along with financial donations, employee volunteer days, long-term nonprofit partnerships, and more.
Tina Winham
*Walmart Leader – Conair HBA
*Title and company of the author reflect their position at the time article was written.
The opinions expressed here by guest bloggers are their own, not necessarily those of Stout Executive Search.