For these companies, employee volunteerism means improved collaboration and productivity on the job
Computerworld – You might think Steve Kranson, who works at Comerica Bank in Auburn Hills, Mich., is your average IT manager. But he’s also been known to log hours dressed up like the Easter Bunny, to the delight of local kids.
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Paychex: Boosting pride while touching the community
Five years ago, when celebrity poker was all the rage, an IT director at Rochester, N.Y.-based Paychex suggested that the company’s 1,000-person IT department stage its own poker tournament and donate the proceeds to breast cancer research. Twenty bucks got you into the game, which was limited to 100 players. That year, proceeds came to about $2,000, all of which went directly to cancer research.
Since then, the tournament has become an annual event, raising $2,000 to $2,500 a year.
Another Paychex IT director proposed that the department get involved with inner-city Rochester schoolchildren. He felt that the company’s IT professionals could mentor students and encourage them to do well in school and pursue careers in the technology arena.
PaychexArboretum
Paychex IT staffers recently volunteered as a group to help clean up at a local arboretum.
That effort annually involves between 15 and 20 IT staffers who volunteer their time to the students who, at the end of the program, are formally recognized at a graduation ceremony and luncheon at Paychex’s headquarters.
“There is no tracking of activities relative to company time,” notes Canzano. “The company encourages employees to participate [in volunteer activities]. It’s absolutely part of our culture and a source of pride for us.”
It’s also a big morale booster for employees like Donna Deffenbaugh, administrative assistant to the IT department. Deffenbaugh has been on volunteer teams that have done gardening work at a local arboretum and helped out at a group home for disadvantaged people.
“This year, we went to a senior citizen home, and the back of my shirt said ‘Paychex,'” Deffenbaugh recalls. “One woman at the home worked at Paychex in the mid-1970s, and she was so excited and told me how she used to do payroll. They were thrilled to come up and ask us about Paychex. It’s very motivating.”
Booz Allen Hamilton: Employees pick their projects
“I’ve done everything from refurbishing homes in the D.C. area to helping organize a bowling event for a scholarship program for kids,” says Derrick Burton, director of internal IT strategy at McLean, Va.-based Booz Allen Hamilton. “There’s a culture here that says you don’t just work for Booz, you work for the community you’re in,” he explains. As Burton sees it, IT brings unique talents to bear on all variety of volunteer projects.
“Engineering and IT people are good at diagnosing the problem and mapping out the project. People in IT are also used to hard deadlines and used to doing a lot with a little money. Those skills and the drive to make sure it’s done right all come out in the variety of projects we work on,” he says.
Volunteering on outside projects also gives IT employees an opportunity to match names and email addresses with real, live co-workers.
“With mobility and people working all over the place, you do a lot of collaborating, but you don’t know folks and you don’t see folks,” Burton notes. “Bringing them together builds teamwork and camaraderie. You also have junior and senior people working together on the same projects. What you find out is people are just people. They’ve got kids to raise and bills to pay. You get the opportunity to have conversations with other people in the firm who you may not have been comfortable having a conversation with before because you thought they were somehow superior.”
For the most part, employees come up with the volunteer projects to work on. The company kicks in with dollars, offering employees who donate 40 hours of their time to charitable works the opportunity to apply for a service grant.
“This way, you have dollars plus employees delivering value with their skills,” notes Joe Suarez, senior adviser, community partnership and philanthropy, at Booz Allen Hamilton.
The benefit of this employee-centric model is that it allows employees to choose projects where they know they can best apply their own skills and have the greatest impact, he adds.
Adventist Health: Making connections among busy staffers
IT employees at Adventist Health System can volunteer an hour a week on company time and get paid for it. They take a team approach, pooling their skills and their time to, among other things, help a charity called the Center for Independent Living by building ramps at the homes of people who rely on wheelchairs. In the past five years, IT workers have built 15 to 20 ramps.
“It requires no experience and after many years, we’ve gotten pretty good at it,” says Francisco Manalo, an IT director at Adventist Health’s Helen Ellis Memorial Hospital in Tarpon Springs, Fla.
“It helps to build a strong team because most of our IT folks don’t work together,” he says.
“It’s also a very rewarding experience seeing the homeowner [use the ramp for the first time] after the building is completed,” says IT manager David Walker, who is the coordinator for the ramp-building projects.
Other volunteer projects Adventist employees have worked on as a team include building homes for Habitat for Humanity, cleaning up litter on highways, refurbishing playgrounds and working at a food bank.
“We encourage volunteerism from the top down, but it’s also a grass-roots effort,” says CIO John McLendon. Even though the focus is volunteering for the project at hand, work-related benefits also accrue.
“You’d be surprised how much work you get done picking up trash on the side of the road,” he says. “[The] added bonus is that when you come back to work and need help from someone in applications support or another department, you have something in common with that person. When relationships are made through volunteerism, it paves the way for efficiency.”
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