CSR360

Posted: Tuesday 10 May 11, 10.00am GMT

The outstanding results of the European Employee Volunteering Awards (EEVA) speak for themselves. At a truly pan-European scale the awards collected an unprecedented number of good and best practice examples from companies and public authorities which demonstrate how effectively employee volunteering can help people from disadvantaged communities and groups to overcome barriers to work, increase employability skills and to foster high levels of social inclusion. The awards are not only a valuable contribution to the European Year of Volunteering, but will also provide a strong impetus beyond the year 2011 and will help to increase the impact of employee volunteering.

A unique opportunity
As the national network of engaged businesses and local non-profit intermediary organisations in Germany, UPJ aims at fostering long-term co-operation between businesses, community organisations and public authorities in order to contribute towards the sustainable development of society. The EEVA provided us with a unique opportunity to support our mission, contribute our expertise, complement our existing employee volunteering programmes and further promote business community investment and cross-sector co-operation in Germany. At this point, however, we would like to thank all involved partners from across Europe, judges, supporters and sponsors as well as organisations that applied for the award. The EEVA would have been impossible without the strong commitment, great expertise, active support and hard work of all those parties.

SMEs, under-represented
German businesses play a vital role in working towards a sustainable society: e.g. through environmental protection or the collaboration with local community organisations. The awards in Germany have illustrated that employee volunteering programmes are increasingly implemented by businesses of all sectors and sizes. However, there is a clear trend that employee volunteering programmes are implemented especially by large service companies. Although we received some great entries from manufacturing companies and small and medium sized enterprises, those types of businesses are clearly under-represented among the entries.

This means that there is a need to develop more employee volunteering programmes that are tailored to the framework conditions of manufacturing companies and the specific skills of their employees in order to unlock the full potential of the German workforce. On the other hand, it is necessary to provide more easy-to-step-in volunteering opportunities for Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs), the much praised powerhouse of the German economy.

Lessons learnt
In addition, it may be recommendable to provide SMEs with a less complex and time-consuming opportunity to enter the awards. Some other trends that could be identified in Germany are the increasing number of joint programmes that combine the expertise of several companies, a growing focus on skills based volunteering and capacity building of community organisations instead of working with the direct target group in the community as well as the growing awareness of public authorities for the value of employee volunteering and to partner with businesses.

Overall, running the European Employee Volunteering Awards for the first time was a challenging but even more so an inspiring experience. From our perspective, there are still many good examples of effective programmes out there that are just waiting to be discovered, and there is still a lot of space for improvement to unlock the full potential of employee volunteering. What better instrument than the EEVA can there be for achieving this? Let’s do it again!