Learning Series | 2022 Volunteer Strategy Planning

Summary: Worried about how you should be planning for 2022 volunteer goals? Ben and Andy from WeHero chat through key goals to set and how to plan your impact in such an unpredictable time.

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Transcript:

Andy - WeHero: Ben excited to chat with you again on the we hero learn series. Thanks for joining us today.

Ben - WeHero: Best way to spend the hour on a Monday.

Andy - WeHero: Well, awesome today, you know, it's, it's only the beginning of October here when we're, when we're recording this, but we are coming up on a really important time of year for CSR professionals around the world. And that is really plan planning for 2022. It's crazy. We've made it to 20, 22, whatever the next couple months, most CSR professionals are gonna be planning their goals for the next year, as well as how do they meet those goals? So I wanted to, to open it up and kind of ask you a, a generic question, you know, as you're planning goals, what do you think are some of the most important goals to have for the next year and how are those different than planning in 2021 or 2020 given COVID and the new work environment?

Ben - WeHero: Yeah, really good question. A lot of companies obviously are doing this thinking right now and I think the big challenges just like it was in 2021 is in 2022 is how much of these vol, how, how many of these volunteer engagements are gonna be done in person? How do we need to set up our volunteering to scale to make sure we engage our employees in the right way? And how do we make that different in comparison to what our employees did in 2020 and 2021? I think there's all those things are being considered right now. And, and it's challenging. And I think that the biggest thing I I'd say a lot of times are really trying to think through you is how they have flex inside of their planning. And what I mean by flex is how do we make sure we are planning out volunteer engagements that if we're planning in person can be easily pivoted to being virtual or done at home how do we make sure we feel have people feel comfortable if they're doing a volunteer engagement in the office?

Ben - WeHero: And so we're seeing a lot of that thinking and take place now. And I think that's a key word is how do we make these flexible plans in the sense that we can change them in a very agile fashion? And so there's one thing I could tell people right now is to, to have that in focus for 2022, cuz there's still so much up in the air. You're a larger company. It's just really hard to plan right now. So work as much flex as you can into your ending and make sure you have that plan B and that plan C put in place cuz the companies that did that in 2021, they had a lot of success. There was a lot of companies that had planned in person engagements and quickly did the pivot to a hybrid model. Quickly did the pivot to being at home and they hit their engagement goals, which is really exciting to see. And they were gonna see a lot of companies do that. I have a few other areas of what people can think about, but first thing I'm curious if you're seeing any of that and if you have any thoughts around just that flex and being agile right now.

Andy - WeHero: Yeah. Well I have a follow up question cuz as we think about goal setting and talk about it a lot, I mean we talk about impact goals, donation goals. And when you, you know, the changing work environment, are you seeing companies change their, you know, Don goals or impact goals at a high level or are they changing their goals on how to reach those high level goals?

Ben - WeHero: They're changing their goals on how to reach the high level goals. So I think with most companies we're speaking with, they're keeping their goals the same or they're even slightly increasing. I I've spoken with a couple companies on just employee engagement in general and they're holding their, their goals standard. So they're not adjusting those. They're just adjusting how they reach those to, and at least that's what I'm seeing right now, Andy.

Andy - WeHero: Yeah, that's it's I think consistent with what I've seen is, you know, companies every year, you know, over the last handful of years have wanted to increase their engagements, increase the amount of good that they do in the world. And so I think that's consistent. We love seeing those goals slowly increase over time, but I think there's less and less clarity over the last two years on how these companies are each those goals. And so, you know, I think the companies that obviously were successful in this pasture and will be successful in the coming years are companies that really focus on the high level goals and determine, you know, we don't know how we're gonna get to, you know, that high level goal, whether it's, you know, what technique or what, what method we're going to use, but we know we need to get the high level goal. And so companies who are actually only planning out a quarter ahead, if they can be that nimble, they're actually in a better place than if you're forced to plan for the year ahead.

Ben - WeHero: And I think there's increasing pressure as well to keep those goals level set. And at that same level, because we have thousands of employers that are just resigned right now. And so when we look at just engagement and giving, like it's, it's so important and the day it continues to show it's increasingly important to these employees. And so you hear point, yeah, they're keeping these goals, but then, then they're going, okay, how do we reach these quarter or after quarter? Because it's just becoming increasingly important.

Andy - WeHero: Yeah. So, so a more tactical question. Let's say you run a company with 2000 employees and you are involved in the, let's say you manufacture wallets. I'm just making, making this up And you have an great business. You have an engagement goal that you to engage all 2000 of your employees next year, you said that goal. What are you doing now when it's October, are you more focusing on what causes you wanna support certain day planning when you don't know where your company's gonna be?

Ben - WeHero: I think a really good way to organize this. And we've done this in the past where companies is create a social impact count and what that outline does and what those guidelines do for you. And that kind of STR strategic thinking really helps you understand, okay, when are we volunteering during the year? And what causes do our employees really care about? And now is the time where we really wanna start gauging employees to understand what causes do you care about? What should we be supporting in 2022? And once you understand that, then aligning it with key dates and holidays to make sure that those engagements are taking place. If you're hosting a reforestation event, you're gonna have a lot more employees engaged around earth day than you would in the middle of July. And so aligning that with key dates and key themes and key causes and building what we call again, that social impact calendar is something that I think a lot about right now.

Ben - WeHero: And again, you know, it's not that tactical of like, okay, what are we actually doing during those dates? But it's, it's more about at a high level, what are we gonna be supporting? What are we gonna be planning for? And then we can think about an agile fashion, how we're actually gonna deliver on those employee engagements. And so that's something I need, like in October, I'm thinking a lot about as my wallet company for 2022 is how to get all those employees making wallets engaged. I I'm curious your take though in regards to what you are also doing in October of 2021 right now.

Andy - WeHero: Yeah. I mean, we've been doing this a lot with the comp the real companies that we've been working with. And, and I think a lot of it is building out the high level plan. You know, let's focus just on employee engagement. Let's say you have to get that 2000 E you know, 2000 people engaged. All right. How do we wanna structure that over the whole year? And how do you want to get them engaged? You know, I think traditionally volunteering has been viewed in one way, but over the last few years, you know, you have all different methods of volunteering. And so what's the breakdown. Do you wanna really focus on skills based volunteering? Do you wanna focus more on, on, or do you wanna do more education based volunteering? Those, those are all things I would be planning right now. And then I would set a schedule just so you know where you're gonna get that impact throughout the year and you can choose what time of year.

Andy - WeHero: And then I would almost back into how we're gonna meet that engagement goal. That way you can track it through the year. So let's say you had two big days plan for January and February where you thought you were gonna get a thousand of your employees engaged. If you only got 500 of those employees engaged, when you thought they were gonna be a thousand, you need to adjust the rest of the year plan. And that way you don't end up in December calculating your volunteer hours and realize you're so much shorter than you actually should be. And so I think it's important to have a plan and then track and report on that plan as you go. So that would be my big thing. And obviously, you know, the donation side of it, you can tack onto that

Ben - WeHero: Really quick to touch on something you mentioned at the beginning around just volunteer formats. I think that's something really important to survey your employees on as well, along with the causes that they care about. Because I think what you'll find is that employees are also passionate or they, they find value in different aspects of volunteering. For some, they find a lot of value in just that form of team building in that way coming together and doing something together, that's for the greater good. Some people find a lot of value in the learnings and the storytelling and that empathy around different cause areas and different populations and communities and cultures. And so I think that's important because I think everyone's looking for what's new and volunteering in the new change, and what's gonna make it unique and exciting for employees understand what's gonna make it unique and exciting for them. If it's empathy and storytelling, let's focus, our volunteering and those experiences towards those areas that we know your, your employees really care about. And so that's something I, I I'd touch on too. And something we can survey employees right now to understand what they really care about when it comes to volunteering.

Andy - WeHero: It's an absolute great point. And I would encourage everyone to survey their employees and now's just to great time to do it, cuz you're really setting yourself up for success, but back to this wallet company. So you've set this schedule, you know, it's not gonna interfere with your wallet manufacturing, and now you wanna think about some of the other programs and other things to implement for the year. I'd love to hear just your thoughts and ideas on, you know, are you gonna know reward and award certain volunteers? And how would you structure, you know, the volunteer management team. And I'd love to hear on structuring the team. I'd love to hear that you have a 10 person CSR team. And what would you do then? And what would you do if you only had a one person CSR team?

Ben - WeHero: Yeah, let's start with the latter. If you're a one person CS start team or even a two person for that case, majority of these teams are really small. You really need the help of your employees, your fellow team members to like actually make these programs successful. And I'm a huge fan of the champion system. Having champions that are aligned with either specific DNI groups that are within the company with, you know, employee resource groups that are in the company or just different divisions of the company, every company's structured a little different, but figure out how you can structure your champions and organizer champions. So if you're a one or two person, you know, CSR group for this 2000 employee, you know, wallet company, you know, having five, six volunteer champions working with you, meeting with you every month or every quarter to how we're gonna reach our engagement goals is something that you can really lean on to help you scale your efforts.

Ben - WeHero: And I think that that's really helpful. And it also allows you to gather input from those employee resource groups from those different champions. It's really helpful to get those inputs, to make sure that you were actually creating experiences that the employees are actually gonna care about. And that's just, just gonna increase engagement. And so really lean heavily on that. If I'm the 10 to 20 person CSR team, I forget the number you threw out there, Andy. I, you know, oddly enough, I would probably still invoke the use of champions cuz again, I think it's just a really great temperature check on the organization to have that and gets instant buy-in from the different groups or division throughout a cup. I think there's, you know, obviously such a wealth of resources when it comes to having 10 to 20, you know CSR leaders within a 2000 person company that you could do a lot in regards to organizing and the number of events that you can plan and execute in regards just reporting and the data tracking all of that. But again, I think the use of, of champions is something I would, I would really highlight there. Curious if you have any thoughts around that though.

Andy - WeHero: I couldn't agree more. I think regardless of the resources you have, you're gonna better engage your team by, you know, building a group of employees who are passionate and can more closely touch the broader employee group. And so I, I love the, you know, I love it when our clients are willing to use that model and I think it makes it more successful. And I also think it allows for quicker pivoting, you know, if you're a small all CSR team you're in your own bubble, but if you're constantly getting feedback from employees from all these champions, you're gonna make changes more quickly, so you can increase engagement and hopefully improve the impact you're delivering as well.

Ben - WeHero: Yeah. To give one more piece of tactical advice for, let's say it's a wallet company, that's 20,000 people, you and it's a global wallet company. What do you do then? And you're a two person CSR team. Let's just take it to like drastic measures, right? So there's one more piece. I would add all that the champion model. I still thinks the best way to go in regards to organizing volunteer efforts and getting buy-in for those different employee groups. I think the other thing that's really powerful is creating what I call a volunteer toolkit. And the volunteer toolkit is basically a package of resources that enable those champions to plan and host volunteer experiences for that employee base. This is really helpful when you're doing volunteer efforts in different countries, in different languages and making sure again that those volunteers feel like they're supporting their local areas and their local communities through those kinds of engagements. And so I would highly recommend that and those toolkits obviously look different company to company in regards to what's needed. But I think again, having that social impact calendar that we talked about the beginning of the call and having that volunteer toolkit, just, I think that creates a lot of success for, for companies.

Andy - WeHero: Yeah. And, and it's also interesting to see some companies we've worked with have almost forced goals upon those champions. And so they are really providing ownership to this, you know, volunteer really to coordinate these, these, these experiences and engagement opportunities for their employees, but they're giving them real goals. And that kind of relates to the award system that you, you know, I know we have worked on in a number of clients together where someone sets volunteer goals and they wanna reward certain employees. I'm curious, when you think about that, do you like it? Do you not like it does it depend on the company and how would you set goals for the next year and include rewards into that?

Ben - WeHero: I think it so much depends on company culture, right? The, each one of these companies have their own DNA and, and some of these companies, the cultures are incredibly competitive and rewards really drive participation and engagement and performance. And in some companies, the cultures don't drive that at all and rewards don't mean anything. You know, in some cases the champions that they do it because they feel like they're getting value of just being, having more visibility having those opportunities to use company resources, to give back and volunteer. And so I don't have a, a great answer to that, Andy, but I would say it's, it's a big reason why we take a customized approach with every single company, cuz volunteering is such a big aspect of a culture that we don't want to mess up that culture through invoking some kind of rewards program where it doesn't work, but for the companies that do use rewards, I think it works well.

Ben - WeHero: It elevates like the good that's coming out of your community, elevate the good that, and the stories that are coming out of your company. And I think when people see those stories and they see those stories of success, they're one inspiring, but two invoke a huge amount of empathy across the organization around, you know, causes that a brand cares about and seeing those people actually take time out of their day to support those causes of things, really powerful and rewarding at acknowledging that is, is huge. And you know, we've seen that at, you know, the volunteer level, the champion level the division level. And I think again, depending on your structure and size of the company, rewards can be really powerful. And just again, the more we can share stories of success and giving back and volunteering the, the better, but curious if you have any thoughts on reward systems and I know you and I are competitive people, so rewards are great in our world, but

Andy - WeHero: Yeah, I think the only thing I would disagree with you on is you know, just a tactical example is we often suggest, you know, quarterly rewards for volunteers with a quarter things of that nature. And I think that works great in competitive company called cultures where it's viewed as a positive for everyone, even if you don't win. But I think even in companies where it's not that culture, there can be a lot of value in having, you know, an annual volunteer award for an employee, not on the CSR team who went above and beyond to deliver impact. And I think the reason I would always encourage something like that is because it brings in the entire company into the volunteering. You know, if you're at a 20 per 20,000 person company, a hundred thousand people company, you know, there may be people who just don't even know that volunteering goes on.

Andy - WeHero: And so if you have, you know, the CEO, the head of your division and executive leader at the company take time out of everyone's day in an all hands meeting, one of the quarterly presentations by the CEO to, you know, reward one of the volunteers. It not only really encourages more participation, but it also just gets more people aware. And oftentimes it gets the CEO aware that so much volunteering is happening and it may include them in future engagement. And so I would always encourage it regardless of the company culture, but when a company culture doesn't necessarily align with it, you have to be more selective and do it in a different way. For sure.

Ben - WeHero: Yeah. And to your point, I would say majority of companies for sure would all benefit and, and it would have no issues at all with like a reward based system like that.

Andy - WeHero: Yeah. Final question on goal setting for the year, you know, it's October the wallet company, how do you think about setting goals for executives? You know, you're leading the CSR team. How are you thinking of goal setting as it relates to executives? Do you wanna fill them in on the goal, obviously if they're involved in someone you report to, but do you wanna have them involved in the goals? Do you give them their own specific goals? What, how do you think about that relationship?

Ben - WeHero: Yeah, and I know that various C companies, well, but I think that the goal for any company is executive part patient, right? Like, and to your point that you just brought up, if we get executives participating you know, that culture gets created from the top down and if we get them participating, it's a huge win. So goals around our executives need to participate in one volunteer event this year one volunteer event together. We've seen a couple companies do that last year. It was amazing. Think the impact that that had on the entire culture of the company. I think if you have executives that are already very bought in and they're volunteering, I think it's more so getting their buying for the actual, you know, plan for the year, getting their involvement where they're gonna advocate where they're gonna be actually participants in the volunteer event. I think it's super powerful as well. So again, like gauge it where you're at, where your company's at in regards to engaging executives and then build goals off of that. So again, if you're just trying to engage executives for the first time, maybe one goal of one volunteer event for those executives, or if your executives really bought in, how are they involved throughout that entire process throughout the year? Any other thoughts around that, Andy,

Andy - WeHero: The only other thought I would, I would add kind of the more extreme version. I mean, we've worked with companies where the executives are actually driving the volunteer strategy and they're, you know, if you have a competitive culture, start a competition among each division, each executive's division, right? Who can get the most engagement, who's gonna be donating the most with the corporate match, all of these things, I think, you know, further ingrain the executives. I think the more you can involve them, the more it becomes part of the corporate culture, which is what we're looking for.

Ben - WeHero: Yeah. An example, and this doesn't really help with planning too much, but maybe just an idea for folks. I, a company this past year, each executive did a skills based project with their team. So the chief marketing officer to skills bay project, and they built out a marketing plan for a company. You know, the chief financial officer did like a full audit for a nonprofit, the chief technical officer, their team. They went out and actually built like, or redid a website. And I think that's really cool. Like it just sends a huge message throughout the company that these executives are taking time to like, do good, good with their teams and do good with their greatest resource, which is talent. And I think that's really special. So again, not like a tactical strategic thing, but more so an idea for a way to engage executives for those companies that are going above and beyond to do the work.

Andy - WeHero: But I think that's a great point for people who are doing corporate planning and goal setting. You know, we have a goal of every single executive doing a small skills based team based event with people that report into them. I think these are all, you know, we, we get, you know, we often look at goals, so high level, you know, volunteer hours engagements, you know, how many people are we helping? What are our employees feedbacks? How much are we giving? What's the donation total, how many grants, but there's so many goals underneath that. And I think these top level goals are great, but you need the, the ways to actually make them happen because businesses aren't built to volunteer. And so you really have to force it and build it because it is not naturally what you should be doing. I it it's, you know, it really helps companies, but it's not why the company was formed. I think the more tactical goals you can have, the more likely you are to meet them.

Ben - WeHero: Any final thoughts, we should give companies any final thoughts on how they, what, what they can do for their planning this year.

Andy - WeHero: The only thing I'd say is we've probably in the last couple weeks, had 10, 20 conversations companies thinking about doing this. So if you're struggling with your goals, trying to figure out what to do or want some extra feedback, just give Ben and I a call and we're happy to jump on the phone and chat through how we're thinking about goal setting, as well as just what we've seen from some of the innovative companies. And so we'd love to help out in any way that we can.

Ben - WeHero: We're here to make this as easy as possible.

Andy - WeHero: All right. Well, Ben, appreciate the time. Look forward to seeing the wallet company's future success in volunteering. And look forward to talking again. Soon

Ben - WeHero: WeHero wallets. You keep an eye out for us.

Andy - WeHero: Awesome.