WHAT DOES CORPORATE VOLUNTEERING ENTAIL?

RSC (Corporate Social Responsibility/ CSR) is defined as the integration of economic, social and environmental dimensions into the management of businesses. It always works on a voluntary basis and fulfills the expectations of the different interest groups.

Today it is evident that the RSC is an innovative and competitive tool in a global economy as well as an important lever of social change. Now, more than ever, the sustainability of any business depends on its capacity to adapt to whatever many changes present themselves. 

The objective of corporate volunteering, a method that is contained within the RSE (…) More and more businesses want and aspire to incorporate Social Responsibility into their management systems.  Due to this, the FPW aspires to incentivize, channel, and take advantage of the potential that exists in the personnel of businesses in order to benefit social needs. 

 In Spain, this method is still not very widespread; however, it is well developed in other countries such as the United States and Great Britain. It is necessary to point out that this attitude is more commonly found in large companies and has more difficulty reaching the small and medium-sized businesses that still compose the majority of businesses in Spain.

There are many different types of corporate volunteering. One of the most widespread is professional volunteering that consists in a member of staff performing the same type of work that they carry out in their regular post, but in the benefit of an NGO or association. In this way, the business allots the employee hours during the workday so that he/she can participate and become familiar with the work of a charity organization.

It is important to remember that all of these activities must be voluntary — that is to say that a business can never obligate its employees to participate in this type of activity if they don’t want to since the goal of corporative volunteering is to promote of culture of collaboration, to raise the staff’s awareness of the social needs of other groups and to let them discover new values and put into practice the solidarity that allows people to develop more completely.