Opportunities to help out in the community are becoming as big a pull for candidates as salary and flashy benefits; Leo Martin explains the allure of helping out in the local environment.

Developing people, recruiting the best new staff and keeping staff turnover low has been a vital part of business success for years. Personal and professional development of employees is considered to be of obvious benefit in most workplaces.

But while traditional classroom training has become less fashionable, learning by experience is now commonplace. Indeed, taking a team, or a collection of individuals, out of the workplace and into an unfamiliar and sometimes uncomfortable setting is an established way of building teams, testing individuals’ personal attributes and developing skills such as communications, project management and leadership.

Classic methods include acting out disaster scenarios (from the comfort of a hotel suite), orienteering in deepest, darkest Wales and raft-building in the Lake District.

What is interesting is the newly emerging industry of linking training with corporate community involvement. The experience of volunteers in the community has in many instances given good and unexpected feedback to HR directors about the benefit of volunteering. Taking this a stage further, some companies are looking to use the volunteering type experiences as much more of a formal training opportunity.

This new type of structured training programme in the community has been labelled ‘socially responsible development’ (SRD) by one organisation that we have come across during our assessments. This organisation (called Three Hands) has developed training programmes based around corporate community investment and involvement activities. The argument put forward by them is that this type of training works because it puts people in a real life setting, where the results really matter.

For example a team from Pfizer went on a week’s training in Scotland. But instead of building a raft and sailing away the team had to raise at least £7,500 to pay for 25 ‘Hospital Playboxes’ (to enable children to role-play going into hospital), to deliver those Playboxes to remote hospitals in Scotland and Northern Ireland by public transport and to raise media awareness of the charity at every opportunity.

Unlike the case of the raft, which will be dismantled at the end of the course, the results really matter. And because the results matter, the training is rated highly by the participants.

In the case of the Pfizer team, they managed to raise £15,000, delivered all of the Playboxes and raised awareness of the charity so that it experienced a noticeable increase in enquiries. At the same time, the team did a huge amount to address their own learning objectives in areas such as leadership, planning and analytical thinking.

So is the era of raft-building dead and buried? Not just yet it seems. Theoretical outdoor exercises will no doubt remain popular. However, the SRD concept, while still quite new, is without doubt compelling. Many employees state that the chance to do something useful in the community is one of the strongest ‘feel-good’ factors that attracts them to their employer.

In another piece of assessment work in Mexico we found a car parts factory that was training young homeless people to be motor mechanics. They took employees from the factory to help with the training and education about the motor-parts and their technical performance. It was noticeable how many times, employees cited their involvement in this scheme as the best reason to work at the company.

These types of programmes are good news for HR directors who, like other senior managers, are under pressure to both innovate and to try to build in corporate responsibility into their work.

Leo Martin is director and founder of GoodCorporation, the corporate responsibility standard and is the principal character in the BBC’s series, Good Company, Bad Company.

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• Ashes fever hits a nerve




• Banging the drum




• Damage limitation




• Is it a myth?




• Should HR care about ‘Non’ & ‘Nee’?




• Responsibility in action




• Doing ‘good’ with HR




• The pope, the EU and the Election




• Breaking down ‘woolly’ notions




• What’s all the fuss about?




• Does it really pay to be good?