If your employer still believes that team building is best achieved by an outdoor adventure or a game of paint-ball, perhaps it’s time they woke up.

Staff today are more interested in helping others than they are in wallowing about in mud. Indeed, more and more employers are finding that supporting their employees’ voluntary activities can not only raise the company’s standing in the local community, but can also improve the performance and loyalty of its staff.

Research by Community Service Volunteers (CSV) and Barclays Bank suggests that employers who support staff in voluntary work can expect to see improved recruitment, retention and staff morale and less absenteeism. More than 80 per cent of the 200,000 staff questioned said they would prefer to work for a company with an employee volunteering project than one that didn’t. Jason Tanner, from CSV, says that supporting employees’ voluntary activities makes sense for all involved.

“If an employee spends the lunch hour helping a child to improve his or her reading skills then the child benefits and the school benefits,” he says. “But the employee will return to work refreshed from a change of scene and may also be learning new communication skills or problem-solving skills that they wouldn’t learn in the workplace. So, everybody wins.”

For the past seven years Lora Willets has run www.deafgamers.com, a website that reviews computer games from the perspective of someone who is deaf. She runs the site on a voluntary basis but enjoys considerable support from her employer, PC World, which has helped to organise workshops for deaf gamers and provided financial support for equipment upgrades. The company supports more than 200 employees in voluntary activities either individually or as part of the parent company DSGi’s Switched On Communities campaign to improve disadvantaged groups’ access to technology. “They’ve been very supportive,” she says. “And that does mean you are happier and more committed at work and maybe more likely to go that extra mile.”

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