(Illustration by Yarel Waszul)
More than 27 percent of Americans donate time to nonprofit organizations, and 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies run corporate programs to enable volunteer efforts. Until recently, however, no data existed to measure the impact of volunteering on employees’ day-to-day job performance.
As it turns out, do-gooders are also good for a company’s bottom line. “Employees who volunteer are better employees,” says Jessica Rodell, an assistant professor of management at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business. According to her research, employees who volunteer—either through corporate programs or on their own—work harder than employees who don’t. Employee volunteers are also less likely than their non-volunteer colleagues to engage in behaviors that are harmful to the company, such as taking lengthy lunches or surfing the Web during work hours.
For her study, which she conducted as part of her doctoral work, Rodell gathered data on several hundred people who combine full- or part-time work with volunteer efforts. In one phase of the project, she posed questions to 172 full-time employees who volunteer for organizations such as Meals on Wheels, the Humane Society, and Habitat for Humanity. She then surveyed each employee’s coworkers to gain information on the employee’s work performance.
Because employees have a limited amount of time and energy each workday, managers often view volunteering as a form of moonlighting or as a distraction from the job. But Rodell’s research challenges that assumption, according to Jason Colquitt, professor of management at Terry College of Business. “Volunteering was shown to increase absorption in one’s job, which improves job performance,” says Colquitt, who supervised Rodell’s work in his role as chair of her dissertation committee.
That finding caught Rodell by surprise. When she surveyed coworkers about their attitude toward employees who volunteer, they often used words like “distracted,” “self-righteous,” and “brown-nosing” to describe volunteers. But such attitudes don’t reflect the true impact of employee volunteering on work life. “I found it intriguing that there’s actually no downside for the company to [employee] volunteering,” says Rodell.
The decisive factor behind the positive outcomes, Rodell found, is that people have an insatiable desire for meaning: When they work at an organization or in a job that is meaningful to them, they want to engage more deeply with it. Adam M. Grant, professor of management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees with that analysis. “When we volunteer, we gain a sense of meaningfulness that enables us to invest more energy in our work,” says Grant, whose own research has dealt with employee volunteering.
In Grant’s view, Rodell’s work has important implications for managers and employees alike. As managers learn that volunteering can enhance performance, they may become more enthusiastic about sponsoring corporate volunteer programs. “The key is to match volunteers with causes that they find personally meaningful and that either align with their skills or enable them to develop and hone job-relevant skills,” Grant says. Rodell’s findings may also inspire employees to give time to charitable groups. “Knowing that there may be performance benefits that go along with any happiness benefits could give them that last bit of motivation to take part,” Grant suggests.
Rodell’s work, according to Grant, is the first major research to examine how volunteering influences employees’ experiences and their effectiveness at work, and it should spur further study. For her part, Rodell hopes that these findings will encourage companies and nonprofit organizations to work together more closely. “I’d like for nonprofit leaders to know that it’s not just that companies are giving manpower and assistance to them. They’re actually giving back to the companies,” she says. “It helps their employees grow and develop, and it makes them better at work. It’s a relationship that goes both ways.”
Read more stories by Corey Binns.