#010 Support Community Service With Dedicated Leave
We’ve hit the double digits of ideas. Here’s a simple one that’s quick to set up, yet impactful, in the policy space.
It’s 2020 and for all the ways we have of virtually connecting with one another, giving someone your in-person presence is still the most powerful way to “show up”.
Whether it’s at a protest, whether it’s being there for a friend — nothing says I’m in this with you, literally, than physical presence.
Yet, for many of us, there aren’t many hours left in the day between work, family, friends, life admin and trying to have a healthy relationship with self-care.
The daily grind so many of us live in, doesn’t leave much room for giving back in the form of time. But to an organisation, a little bit of time is something that they might not even notice giving away.
So, what’s the big idea?
Volunteering leave, or community leave — whatever you want to call it — is essentially a policy that allows staff to spend a certain amount of their paid work hours doing impact work.
Read on below for what this looks like.
For now, here are a few quick reasons about why you might want to consider adopting it, put together by Volunteering Australia.
- For Organisations: Increased company pride and loyalty from staff, improved staff morale, motivation, team spirit and initiative, enhanced relationships between people from different areas of the
organisation, better employee attendance, recruitment and retention, professional and skill development opportunities for staff, and transformative relationships between the organisation and the local community. - For Teams: Opportunities to meet new people and explore new situations and challenges, new and more positive perceptions of career, workplace, peers and management teams, and an increased ability to set individual performance goals, coach and counsel and evaluate performance.
- For Communities: Access to a different pool of volunteers, skills, knowledge and technical expertise, increasing service delivery for beneficiaries, an opportunity to share the organisation’s mission to potential ambassadors, influence behaviours for positive social, economic or environmental impact, increasing public awareness of community issues and creating corporate partnerships and potential income streams for community projects.
Phew. What’s not to love?
Getting Started
We had some great feedback on our template for a Sustainable Travel Policy, so we’ve again created a template for you to kickstart your new effort, or merge it with existing ones.
The key ingredients to think about are choosing the right name*, picking an amount of time that works for your organisation (whether it’s one hour a week, fortnight or month), and thinking about the accounting and communication processes for people to book it in.
* A quick note on naming: Community Service Leave is a legal form of leave in Australia that covers things like jury duty and volunteer emergency response. You’ll need to make sure this difference is noted in your policy, if your name is similar.
It’s all in the template so give it a whirl and adapt it to suit your needs.
Conversation Starters
If you need some ways to open the conversation with peers, seniors or even your own internal dialogue, here are some things you could ask:
- In what ways do we contribute to the local community where our office, or offices, are based?
- How do we support people in our organisation to find meaning in their work?
- What resources (other than dollars) might we have in excess, or in abundant supply, that we could share? This could be in terms of networks, knowledge, time, or physical things like space, hardware, books or resources.
Going Further
Have a community leave program already set up? Congrats! That’s great to hear. Perhaps a next step could be to think about monitoring and measuring how many people are using it within your organisation, and supporting more people to make use of the time. Often I’ve seen it exist in theory, but with very little uptake or support for real-life.
One way to do this would be to work with local community groups that align with your organisation’s values and goals, to identify where they need help, and sharing that back to your team. Knowing where to start, or who to volunteer for may be one blocker in that journey. Here are some other tips for common challenges that Pro Bono Australia put together.
Have other ideas or ways of setting up community leave that you’d like to share? Get in touch with me here to let me know. As always, I’d love to surface and share further ideas and resources from and with the Good Work community.
