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My name is Hilary Reynolds and I am the Deputy Chief Executive of Students, Seniors and Integrity Services
here in the Ministry of Social Development.
I'm on secondment here from the Department for Work and Pensions
and I want to tell you a story about volunteering and the Department for Work and Pensions.
It's a big organisation with a really big heart.
It's staff have always been a watch-word for passion and commitment and really being
at work becuase they care about what they're doing.
But that's not borne out by its staff surveys. Like most organisations the
Department for Work and Pensions
does an annual staff survey of its people - how they feel they belong in the workforce,
whether they're happy there, what makes them feel valued -
and consistently DWP has had a low participation rate in the survey
and lowish engagement rates. And it's nagged at a lot of managers
like me
for a long time, which is
how do we get our staff recognising that they are engaged? And I guess that
nagging sense of what could we do about this would've stayed
except there was a group six of us
who were sent on a civil-service-wide development
programme for people who
and had been tagged as possibly reaching the top of the civil service.
And we six decided to meet up and actually talk about what we could take practically
back to our workplace out of our development programme which would be of benefit to DWP and
its community of clients. We became convinced that as leaders we should
to be able to make a difference.
And the thing that we wanted to make a difference in was this bit that's
been nagging us - what makes a difference to staff's
sense of engagement with the organisation for which they work?
So we thought about stuff and we went to the big boss, the permanent secretary,
with an offer
which we thought he shouldn't be able to refuse
and we said we think we can help staff engagement - will you back us if we come
up with a plan? And he said, come back in three months
and if it sounds like a goer I'll back you.
So we went away
and we did some research.
We did a survey of some of our disaffected staff, the ones that were
scoring really low.
And said that well what is it that
makes you disaffected
and what is it that might turn you back into being engaged with the organisation
and what it stands for?
And what we found is that a lot of
people
valued volunteering. They spent their weekends with the Scouts, or with the
Territory Army, or with their local group for the blind, or helping out at the
local home.
But none of this was ever captured, or celebrated, or recognised,
or said thankyou to
by the organisation for which they worked.
And those staff didn't connect their skills or their interest in volunteering
with work.
So we went back
to our permanent secretary (big boss), with our proposal which went,
how would it be
if there were five thousand people in the Department for Work and Pensions
who had a supported, work-paid day out each year to go and work in a volunteering
group
which had connections with their
client service? How would it be if we could create community five thousand?
Five thousand people each giving up a day of their time,
paid for by the organisation and going to make a real difference.
So we then went and talked to our voluntary groups and said,
how would it be if we could provide you with five thousand days of time from
committed, intelligent individuals who actually make a difference to the work
that you do you with some of our most vulnerable clients? They said, that that would be
fabulous. There is so much we could do if we just have some
person power,
some resources that way.
And the idea had wings and our permanent secretary thought it was a great idea, and our NGO sector thought
it was a great idea.
And when we started talking about it with staff
it took off.
And we created essentially a matchmaking agency.
So we asked our
IT and our national comms person, who are really good at webby stuff,
to design us a really simple web page to use on the DWP intranet
to say, hey if you want to sign up and be one of our community five thousand,
give us a few details -
what you do, what your skills are, what part of the organization you're based in.
And we'll be able to match you up with an NGO that is looking for somebody.
We particularly promoted it for groups because we actually thought of this as a bit of
team
bonding as well.
And we had a huge response from our staff. From a standing start and no
big marketing or anything - it was on the web; we did a celebrating our people
sort of spiel;
a bit of an advert
internally;
and we started matchmaking.
Staff signed up, teams signed up,
the DWP signed up as an organisation.
We got more like 7500 community days in that first
year of operation, from a standing start and with no overt pushing.
What we did though
was track back the results of groups who'd been on volunteering programs
with their staff engagement scores and you could see the difference. There was
a correlation between participation and engagement.
So what made it successful?
Well first of all it was genuinely voluntary.
There was no hierarchical pressure
from managers thinking that this was a good thing to do for their career
or would look
good on their CV. This was genuinely voluntary individual interweb or
teams interweb. People could see the point of it.
Community five thousand - a really simple idea. People could see the point of
organisation giving up a day of your work to go and do this - make a difference.
We did monitor, but using the existing tracking systems through the web,
and through encouraging people to tell us how their
experience had been. And we got heaps and heaps of little short emails
through the template on the web address we'd set up telling us about how
their day had been for them and their teams,
and the clients,
and what they were doing the following Saturday because they wanted to keep going. We
trusted that people who wanted to be volunteering would be going well and
beyond the day we'd set aside anyway, that we didn't have to check that they'd
used up precisely seven hours and twelve minutes or whatever
it was.
The department celebrated all the stories and that was a key factor in the success
because our permanent secretary
was a sponsor,
because a number of us were quite senior and were sponsored.
The stories got celebrated in
local staff magazines, and the intranet and in the voluntary
organisations' own magazines.
So in summary I'd say it was a programme well worth doing - building a community of
five thousand and more,
of benefit to the staff,
and to the voluntary groups and to the clients themselves. Tailor it to your circumstances
and enjoy the opportunity to bring volunteering into the workplace. Thank
you very much for your time.