How to Supercharge Employee Volunteering Engagement – Taking Inspiration from Coventry Building Society

Improve Employee Volunteering with 5 key steps…

A question we’re often asked is this: “how can I get more of my team engaged with volunteering efforts?”

Fortunately, Thrive works alongside many companies that have solved this challenge and are regularly hitting enviable employee engagement rates!

Coventry Building Society is one of the leaders in this area and here they talk about how they built the incredible process and culture to achieve this.

In this article, we talk to senior community specialist Lynne Crosbie, who kindly shared five key lessons that have helped make Coventry Building Society so successful—and which you can apply to your own business.

Volunteering Commitments Embedded in Company Culture

Coventry Building Society’s 2024 Sustainability Report presents some truly impressive headline achievements:

• More than 12,700 hours of employee volunteering
• 15,113 young people helped through education and hardship schemes
• £4.5 million invested in communities

And each of those figures is significantly higher than those reported in last year’s publication!

Building societies have always been at the forefront of putting the “S” into ESG, but Coventry Building Society’s record is exceptional.

Take volunteering. Coventry Building Society uses the Thrive Volunteering module, and they are regularly recording employee engagement rates around 150% higher than our typical users.

This success in driving employee engagement depends on many factors and different strategies which we will come to. But if there’s one thing that underpins all of that, Lynne puts it down to culture:

“It’s part of who we are. It’s not just a tick box to say ‘as an organisation, we want to be seen to be doing this’. We actually are.

“That’s the starting point. Once it is an aim of your organisation, the culture starts to shift. When people want to do things for the community, they’re not having to ask permission. It’s almost expected of them.”

Those values translate into practical measures. Lynne is part of a team of eight, dedicated exclusively to managing community initiatives. And Coventry Building Society allows all of its staff up to 14 hours paid leave per year to do volunteer work.

But it’s one thing to have a company culture that encourages people to get involved. To get them actually doing it is another thing entirely…

How Coventry Building Society Achieves Exceptional Volunteering Engagement

With a workforce of more than 3,000, Lynne and her team face problems that will be familiar to many:

• One-size-fits-all solutions don’t work for diverse workforces and working environments
• It’s a challenge to keep everyone informed about opportunities
• Even when workers are given the time to take part, making sure that participation is really widespread – and doesn’t just involve the “usual suspects”

Here’s how they went about solving those problems.

1.    Fit the Initiatives to the Working Environment

Centrally-planned volunteering activities tend to be focused around off-peak times of the year But on-call and customer-facing staff can struggle to find opportunities to take part in organised activities.

So when call volumes are lower than usual, groups of call centre workers can organise impromptu, local clean-up sessions with litter picking equipment kept on site in a matter of minutes that take as little as an hour to complete. They can then log this within Thrive to share the good news story with everyone.

Branch-based staff can’t all take the day out for team builds, but through the Society’s “Love Locally” scheme, they are encouraged to look at their communities’ needs and provide volunteer resources alone or in pairs where they are required.

Often this takes the form of Skills-Based Volunteering  Colleagues can help local people understand fraud, power of attorney, ISAs, and other subjects where they have expertise. This sometimes means going out to care homes, libraries, schools, or even hosting events in-branch.

Skills-based volunteering can benefit both the volunteer and the community and at the same time can enhance employee development. It helps employees build soft skills like leadership and communication and apply their expertise in new settings. In fact, it can also contribute to organisational growth when integrated into learning and development plans.

With Thrive, volunteers can filter opportunities based on the skills they want to use or develop. This ensures a more meaningful experience, increasing engagement and commitment as they find roles that align with their growth goals.

As Lynne said:

“We show people that their day job is valuable. They can take their skills into the community or to charities which can’t afford to actually pay for support. Our staff can use their skills and work with a group or a cause as a one-off or as an ongoing project.”

2.    Let Colleagues Decide What to Support

Lynne and her team have found that giving colleagues a voice in the kind of volunteering they want to do for what causes makes a big difference.

“Each team is encouraged to choose a charity which they can support through fundraising or volunteering. That works really well because its chosen by and local to them”

The Thrive platform allows volunteers to suggest opportunities they want to participate in and whether they want to do these alone or have the platform promote the opportunity for others to take up. Lynne’s team then get to review and approve suggested opportunities before they go ahead. This has been really important to engage those who have their own personal passions and want to see CBS supporting them.

Once completed, volunteering hours are logged against the per person annual allowance in the Thrive platform and, Lynne is able to see who is actively taking part.

“I can then go to their managers or team and say ‘is there something they would like to get involved with?’ and we try to help find those opportunities for them.”

3.    Develop and Put Forward Opportunities to Inspire Teams

A common pitfall with giving teams lots of autonomy to decide how they want to volunteer is that colleagues won’t know what they could do or have time to find out.

So Lynne and her team spend a lot of time putting together team build opportunities:

“My colleagues and I regularly contact schools, charities, local organisations and causes, or we can go through the Council. We ask ‘what opportunities do you have for team builds?’”

When opportunities are identified, Lynne communicates them throughout the company (and we’ll come onto her communication strategy next…). When a team signs up to get involved, it’s handed over to them to work out the details. That gives the team a sense of ownership without forcing them to do everything from scratch.

Thrive plays an important role in this process. In the past, Coventry Building Society collected everything relating to its volunteering programme in Excel spreadsheets (“very heavy and manual for everybody involved and not particularly easy to do across so many sites and colleagues”, as Lynne puts it). Now, Thrive provides a central hub where everyone can look at what’s going on to find inspiration, get involved, and share their own experiences.

4.    Effective Communication

A team of eight may sound generous to many community engagement professionals, but in the context of a workforce of 3,074 it’s a drop in the ocean.

How does Lynne handle the communication needed to drive such high rates of engagement?

As well as promoting activities via email, newsletters, and through the Thrive platform, the secret lies in a network of 120 “Community Champions” – regular employees who take on an extra responsibility – bridging the gap between the community team and colleagues on the ground.

“As much as we would like to get to speak to everyone, that doesn’t happen. So we empower one person in every team across the whole of the Society to stand as a Community Champion”

Instead of communicating from the centre (which can come across as impersonal), Lynne’s team channels everything through the Community Champions.

“We will always send our communications through this champion network and it’s their job then to then cascade that message, however it best sits with them and their teams.”

Each Community Champion will know each person on their team directly, so every touch point is more meaningful and personal than it ever could be coming from a central source.

Lynne and the Community Champions meet each year for a day of workshops where they talk about past successes, future priorities, and exchange ideas and inspirations.

It’s creating a virtuous circle, as Lynne explains:

“Those workshops really work for us because the Champions do all the geeing up within their own small team of direct colleagues. We then use that support to try and gee up at the corporate level!.”

5.    Thrive Supports Coventry Building Society’s Success

We’ve already seen how the Thrive platform provides an easy-to-use central hub for news and information, and for sharing experiences and best practice.

But by making it easy for Lynne to track individual teams’ and employee’s activity levels and to collate that to see the impact the entire company is having, Thrive is also helping Coventry Building Society make its impact ever-more meaningful.

For example, in previous years the building society was recording even higher levels of engagement than now. But it saw a problem.

“Engagement” was defined too generously – simply being present at an in-branch fundraiser counted. They changed this to a more demanding standard, for example, actually organising the event, volunteering time to get involved etc.

Yes, year-on-year employee engagement dropped, but the figures were made far more meaningful. And as we said at the very beginning, they’re still exceptionally high!

It’s this sort of commitment to real impact that drives home Lynne’s earlier point about culture:

“It’s part of who we are. It’s not just a tick box to say ‘as an organisation, we want to be seen to be doing this’. We actually are.”

Everyone at Thrive is delighted to work with Lynne and Coventry Building Society and to share what they’ve learned in building and maintaining one of the country’s most successful employee engagement programmes. And we’re not just saying that because we were nominated for a CBS Supplier Award!

You can read Coventry Building Society’s newly-published 2024 Sustainability Report in full here.