Encouraging employee volunteering at IBM

IBM has a long-standing commitment to engaging with the communities where our employees live and work, and part of that commitment encourages staff to get involved in their communities. We have very talented and skilled employees – all IBM employees have a university-level education – and we believe that it’s right to share some of those skills and knowledge with the community.
This has obvious benefits for communities. But it also benefits our employees and the business as a whole. IBM has taken community involvement a step further, and integrated it into the business strategy. This focus allows us to help communities far more than if we took a non-strategic approach.

 

Focusing on applying technology
Our overall community involvement strategy is to combine our technology, consultancy capabilities and people in effective partnerships, to bring solutions to some of the systemic problems that impact society. We take a further focus on using our technology capabilities in educational contexts – mainly schools and particularly those in the most challenging circumstances.

Why did we choose this focus? In order to maintain a sustainable business in a knowledge-based society, IBM needs well-educated and technically aware clients, as well as bright, talented and well-educated employees. In addition, well-educated communities are generally more prosperous, more cohesive and thus better environments within which to do business. So it’s in IBM’s interest to focus on educating the young.

We have a clear framework for practically delivering on the strategy in the communities where we live and work:

• Focus on support for education
• Application of IBM technology and skills
• Partnership with experts in the field
• Large projects with systemic and sustainable impacts
• Engaging our employees
• Working with those who are most disadvantaged (primarily, but not only, young people)
• Corporate social innovation

An organizational structure to deliver strategy
At headquarters-level in the US, there is a vice president for corporate community relations, Stan Litow, who sets the overall community relations strategy and manages a central community relations team. He reports to the global head of marketing, who is part of the team of senior executives who work directly with the CEO and chairman.

Below headquarters level there is a head of corporate community relations for each region – EMEA, Asia-Pacific, etc., and reporting to the regional heads of community relations are managers in all of the region’s major markets and many of the smaller markets as well – although some of these roles are part time. There is usually at least one person in each of our countries of operation (and in the US, most states) with responsibility for implementing the strategy.

Country-based corporate community relations managers are responsible for implementing the global program, which has been developed, piloted and tested at headquarters in the US. Understandably with a global program, each region needs to adapt programs – for example, in terms of language, to reflect different cultural norms or the way that organizations are structured in different countries, to ensure their appropriateness.

 

Making a lasting contribution
We don’t just want to donate computers, and then leave. Recipients will of course benefit, but IBM has much more to offer through staff volunteering which enables organizations to make the most effective use of technology and to apply it to transform how they deliver their services and how they manage their operations. General research suggests that much as schools and voluntary organizations want financial donations from IBM, they also are just as interested in accessing knowledge and skills of our staff, as that’s what helps them grow and develop.

The KidSmart program is an example. KidSmart introduces technology appropriately in the early years. There is a wide range of pre-school settings in the UK, often run by voluntary organizations. Some are run by local parents and some are part of state-run schools.

KidSmart operates on two levels. On one level it’s about donating the technology to the pre-schools so that children who might otherwise have limited or no access to it, do gain access. But at another level, alongside the units themselves, is technology training and advice for nursery staff, so that the value of our investment is maximized and maintained through changes in policy and practice, and not just in those nurseries who receive the donated KidSmart units.

 

The On Demand Community program
Two years ago, IBM launched a new commercial strategy, “On Demand Business,” making technology available to clients in the ways they need it at the exact time they want it, so they in turn can deliver to their customers “on demand.”

We’ve extended the concept to employee volunteering, and we aim to recruit 25,000 employee volunteers through the new global “On Demand Community” program. The fundamental concept behind On Demand Community (ODC) is a new, substantial section of the IBM intranet containing resources and training materials to support employees wishing to volunteer. The resources are available to our staff “on demand” – when and where they want them. This level of flexibility is well suited to the range of work styles and practices now prevalent with IBM – e.g., home-based staff, staff working on flexible hours contracts or client-based staff.

Employees searching on the intranet broadly fall into two categories – those already volunteering and those who want to know how to get involved. An integral part of this plan is a section of the IBM intranet that gives IBM employees tools to help them volunteer. It includes:

• links to organizations offering volunteering opportunities;
• tools for volunteers (e.g., activities for schools, IT advice, charity governance);
• a tracking system for registering hours volunteered;
• a community grants scheme for volunteers (launched in March);
• an employee recognition scheme.

Since the launch of On Demand Community in November 2003 more than 1,400 staff have registered on the intranet in the UK and have recorded more than 50,000 volunteering hours. The UK ranks second only to the USA on both counts. In April 2004 over 10,500 IBM UK retirees were invited to join the program and now have access to the ODC intranet through some innovative uses of technology. Adding our retirees to the program brings another potentially formidable force for good to communities.

This level of activity is all the more remarkable when you consider that IBM expects employees to volunteer in their own time. Instead what we can do is to offer staff resources to enhance their volunteering or, if they’re not sure about how to get involved, IBM provides a range of resources to enable staff to get started.

 

Bringing people to the site
We ran a big publicity campaign for the community. In the UK environment, w3, our intranet, has regular features on the site. We try to ensure that there are fresh features and or stories every week or every other week. We held local and regional launches, across our UK office network and run regular in-person volunteer registration sessions across the UK. With 25,000 employees, keeping up a steady stream of information is essential to build awareness and involvement.

The features stress the importance of the skills people have to offer. One of the frequent reasons people give for not volunteering is that they think, for instance, “I don’t know anything about schools – I’m not a teacher, what can I contribute?” We often need to help people recognize that the attributes and skills they’ve gained over their time at IBM are really valuable. It’s also important to link volunteering with what is happening in people’s lives. For example, we recently ran a “Back-to-School” volunteering campaign, recognizing that many of our staff are parents with school-aged children. The campaign pointed staff to resources that they could take into schools to support their (and others) children’s education.

It’s critical to have senior executive support and we have no shortage of that in the UK. For example, there is currently a feature from UK CEO, Larry Hirst, on the Web site, recognizing the importance of employee volunteering and referring to staff who’ve achieved significant results through their volunteering. We also have a “Roll of Honor” listing anyone who has more than 50 hours of volunteering. These staff also get a certificate personally signed by Larry Hirst.

More recently we’ve run an incentivization campaign to encourage people to register – the first step in getting staff involved is to get them to visit the ODC Web site and find out more about what’s going on and is available. Two winners have won weekend hospitality packages in London – and are now volunteering too.

Of course to achieve all this and more requires support from our internal communication staff and this has been willingly forthcoming. Again leadership from the central team in the US has been critical in securing the necessary support at a local level, sanctioning staff to devote scarce resources to this area – and indicates the extent of IBM’s commitment to this program.

 

Measuring the impacts
The company set a two-year goal of 25,000 people registered to volunteer globally, a goal tied to the launch of the ODC Web site for volunteering. This goal has been exceeded already, with 30,000 staff registered. In the UK, with a employee base of 21,000 eligible staff our target has been to see 1,400 people registered. Again this target has now been exceeded. We ask volunteers to record their volunteering time. Globally over 800,000 hours have been tracked – over 60,000 of which have come from the UK.

Other measures include numbers of page hits, community grants awarded and numbers of staff recording more than 50 hours of volunteering. Other measures will follow as the program develops and matures. In 2005 the first community impact study will take place.

 

Giving community grants
While IBM doesn’t offer staff time off to volunteer it does provide recognition in support of employees volunteering in the form of community grants. To qualify, employees have to have completed a minimum of 40 hours of volunteering over a five-month period (effectively eight hours a month) before they reach the qualifying point. Once they’ve met the basic qualifying criteria they can nominate the organization they’re volunteering with to receive a community grant. The level of grant ranges from UK£650 cash through to approximately UK£4,000 worth of equipment for “team volunteering” activities where a minimum of three volunteers have been involved and can demonstrate that they’ve used one or more of the ODC resources on the intranet. The application requires completion of a simple grant form along with providing some additional baseline information about the nominated organization.

 

Addressing the top challenges
Staff in IBM tend to lead busy lives. Working for IBM is not the only thing they do, and engaging their attention requires a continuous effort, using a range of different tactics to get the message out.

The ODC Web site does help manage the complexity of volunteering for staff, allowing us to point people to a single source of information about what community relations does, what the programs are and what materials we have. It’s also a more efficient use of resources as we don’t end up with staff creating similar resources for use in similar contexts – unbeknown to each other. For example, a lot of staff who are parents are approached by the staff in the schools their children attend and are asked if they can support the school in some way – either through equipment donations or giving a presentation about IBM. With On Demand Community, when they receive such requests we can point them to the resources and information on the intranet.

 

Seeking independent evaluation
The overall value of community investment is taken very much as a given at IBM, but at the program level we are concerned to assess the impacts of our individual programs and ensure that our resources are invested wisely and effectively, as well as understanding how we might improve upon what we already do. Just as quality is important to the commercial side of the business, it’s equally important in the pursuit of our philanthropic activities. To get an independent view, we commission external evaluations, often from academia, who have a particular expertise in the area we’re focusing on.

With On Demand Community we will be developing more sophisticated measurement tools, but for now we measure the number of people registered, the hours volunteered, plus the number of commmunity grants given, number of page hits on the different resources. In the future we will have metrics on the impacts on the communities and the impacts on the satisfaction of staff who take part.