Civic engineers

When Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude was asked by Radio 4 earlier this year whether he did any voluntary work he appeared rather flustered, unable to give a clear answer. Now he may be wishing that someone would take the opportunity provided by Volunteers Week (which runs until 7 June) to ask him again; for he, like all ministers, has pledged to volunteer for one day per year for a charity or community group of his choice. The pledge, announced in last week’s white paper on giving, is about leading by example; it’s one way in which the government hopes to encourage more people to give their time and money to support charitable causes.

The ministerial pledge builds on an announcement, made in February, that the civil service is to give 30,000 volunteering days per year, with every civil servant encouraged to take at least one day’s special paid leave to volunteer. The government hopes to build a ‘civic service’ of civil servants who regularly take part in volunteering – or social action, as they also refer to it – and as of April, all senior civil servants (SCS) have been required to encourage their staff to volunteer as part of the corporate objectives included within their performance-management plans.

Ask a senior civil servant (SCS) whether they volunteer, and the chances are they’ll be able to give a better answer than Maude: nearly seven in ten SCS do carry out some kind of formal volunteering, according to a survey of just over 2,500 civil servants carried out last month by Civil Service Worldin partnership with the Civil Service Benevolent Fund (or CSBF - the picutre above shows CSBF volunteers raising money for the Fund).

The civic society today

The survey also provided encouraging results on the government’s ambition to build a ‘civic service’: 47.4 per cent of our respondents already take part in formal volunteering activities. This compares to 38 per cent of the general population who volunteer at least once a year (according to the most recent figures available from the communities department’s citizenship survey).

Most respondents who told us they volunteer said they do so for a charity or public service, with almost half volunteering in a frontline role. This latter fact may encourage the Cabinet Office team working to encourage volunteering. As Sarah Benioff, head of the social action team in the Office for Civil Society (OCS), points out, a key benefit of volunteering as a civil servant is to build a greater understanding how government actions affect frontline organisations.

As the figure below shows, volunteering rates in departments vary significantly. To check our findings, we asked CSBF to let us know how many of its volunteers come from the five largest-employing departments (DWP, HMRC, MoJ, MOD and Home Office). We adjusted our own findings for those departments to take account of that specific sample pool, and the figures lined up well; though the CSBF has a higher proportion of volunteers in the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), Home Office and MoJ than we found.

We also compared our figures with departmental data. Defra’s estimated volunteering figure of 80 per cent (from a 2008 survey) was higher than our finding, while in the Department for Education (DfE) last year’s staff survey showed 13 per cent of people volunteer through a work scheme (they hope to increase this to 25 per cent by next year). Interestingly, our survey found many more volunteers within the DfE. Departmental data often includes only volunteering carried out through official employer-supported schemes – in which departments work with partner organisations to set up volunteering placements – or the amount of ‘special paid leave’ which has been taken to volunteer. Data is much scarcer on overall volunteering levels, which includes informal volunteering and formal volunteering arranged outside of work schemes.

At the DWP Mark Brown, head of organisation insight at DWP’s Organisation Design and Development Directorate, indicates that around 5,000 days were taken off through the department’s employer-supported scheme last year, and about twice that number through its public and community leave policy, which gives paid leave for volunteering. But he knows that his team is “completely unaware” of much volunteering work undertaken by the department’s staff.

Volunteers working outside of departmental schemes may be reluctant to declare their activities, he suggests, because the volunteering is personal to them, and they are concerned they may be expected to change it to fit corporate objectives. Despite these difficulties, Benioff indicates that her team hopes to have more comprehensive data to benchmark progress towards a more civic service by the end of the year.

Raising awareness

So the civil service already does a huge amount of voluntary work; what more could be done to get the 53 per cent who don’t currently participate to start volunteering? Justin Davis Smith, chief executive of Volunteering England, outlines several common barriers to social action which employers can help to overcome. There is firstly a lack – or perceived lack – of time to volunteer; a lack of awareness of opportunities; and a “feeling that their contribution isn’t worth very much; a lack of recognition or appreciation”.

This lack of time and awareness certainly seems to be borne out by the CSWresearch. The survey asked those who do not currently volunteer what would encourage them to so: the most common answers were the ability to access volunteering opportunities through work; more days off from work to volunteer; and more advice on volunteering opportunities. In the ‘free text’ answers, civil servants often mentioned time pressures and a demanding work-life balance as barriers.

Yet most departments are trying to improve access to, and information about, volunteering opportunities through their work-schemes, which are well-publicised on intranets and other internal communications. The DWP has high-profile support from its secretary of state for its ‘Community 10,000’ pledge to provide 10,000 volunteering days this year, and the Department for Education (DfE) has recently run a series of ‘volunteering roadshows’ at its four main sites, including presentations from charitable partners and talks from those who already volunteer.

All of the main spending departments approached by CSWare also offering at least one day’s special paid leave per year for volunteering, on top of statutory obligations to give reasonable time off for ‘statutory volunteering’ such as acting as a justice of the peace or a school governor. Yet of those volunteering, only a third are using these time-off schemes, with 11.7 per cent saying these time-off schemes don’t support their type of volunteering. Of all respondents (whether they volunteer or not), 57 per cent have not investigated or accessed these time off schemes. This could be because most special paid leave policies require volunteers to demonstrate a link to business objectives. In the Department of Health, for example, employees can take just one day off for any form of volunteering, but up to five for health and social care-related activities.

As well as broadening the scope of ‘allowed’ volunteering, departments may wish to encourage more social action by promoting a broader range of volunteering options. The issue could also be addressed by Cabinet Office plans to create a single cross-government site where civil servants can find volunteering opportunities.

This site will be populated with requests coming in from civil society organisations, which are being asked to email civicsociety@cabinet-office.gsi.gov.uk to let the OCS know “what they could do with civil servants who want to volunteer”, says Benioff. As their aim is to respond to the needs of civil society rather than focus on departments’ own objectives, this would allow civil servants to access opportunities beyond their departmental silo – but due to the rules on paid leave, this may still require line managers to take a broad, cross-governmental view of business objectives if they are to give time off for these opportunities.

Flexible times

Employer-organised schemes can be a valuable way of introducing people to volunteering, says Brown. “We very often find the employer-supported scheme gives people a taster, and they are [then] inspired to go on and do volunteering in their own time,” he says.
Brown’s point is echoed by Beryl Evans, head of fundraising at CSBF, who says that employer schemes can be valuable “stepping stones” to other types of social action. For Evans, one important way of increasing volunteering in the civil service is to support line managers so that they are “able to let their staff go [within special leave policies] and encourage them to use [volunteering] opportunities”. Key to this, she says, will be flexibility.

“You don’t have to be spending hours and hours of time to volunteer,” she says: CSBF’s volunteering roles range from spending a few hours a month putting up posters, to a few hours a day working with claimants. So there is flexibility from their end, she says, but “clearly we look to the civil service, as an employing body, to offer flexibility to their staff – not only for us, but for other charities or community projects which people in their workforce want to participate in.”

While special paid leave is one option, flexible working or time-off in lieu agreements might also be used to support volunteering. Ben Wilmott, an adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, agrees that managers wishing to support volunteering in their team should be flexible on working hours where possible. But he adds that this is something “you’d hope good managers are doing [anyway], in terms of providing some give and take around how work is delivered. The key is ensuring that people are [judged on] what they contribute, and not on how long they spend in the office.”

Recognising achievement

Government is trying to address the third barrier to volunteering identified by Volunteering England’s Davis Smith (a lack of acknowledgement) on both a national level – through the new Big Society Awards, for example – and on a civil service level, by including a new category on volunteering in the annual Civil Service Awards ceremony.

Davis Smith says these types of national schemes can have a “striking effect” in promoting the value of volunteering, but he also stresses the importance of smaller-scale and less formal recognition, such as through staff newsletters or intranets. Many departments already do this: in DWP, for example, staff taking part in a volunteering scheme all receive signed certificates from the permanent secretary recognising their achievement.

Evans agrees that recognition goes a long way in encouraging volunteers, but she points out that many don’t want awards – they do the work because they are committed to the causes they’re working for. She suggests this may be the reason behind a seeming anomaly in the CSW findings. A majority of those who don’t volunteer – 70 per cent – say they are supportive of Cabinet Office proposals to encourage and recognise volunteering through the appraisal process; but just 5.7 per cent think having volunteering included in appraisals would encourage them to volunteer. (The figure below shows how support for the proposals varies across different grades, among both those who volunteer and those who do not).

“They are supportive of the proposal, but it’s not a motivating factor to volunteer,” says Evans, “and I wonder if that’s reflecting the fact that volunteers do it mainly because they want to.” It may also, of course, be reflecting a reluctance to be seen as unsupportive of Cabinet Office policy.

Appraising volunteers

Volunteering is already linked to the appraisals system for SCS: as of April this year, the corporate objectives set out in their development plans include a requirement to encourage and support volunteering among their staff. The Giving white paper sets out plans to go further, by strengthening “the use of volunteering as a means of learning and development for civil servants below the Senior Civil Service grades”.

Davis Smith is supportive of the move to help “facilitate the engagement of more junior staff by tying it into the appraisal process [of SCS]”, and thinks it is valuable to allow the performance management process to consider activities – including volunteering – outside work, but he warns: “Volunteering has to remain voluntary. There shouldn’t be pressure brought to bear upon people so that they feel they can’t afford not to [volunteer] if they want to progress.”
On this point, Benioff is clear: volunteering is “absolutely, positively not mandatory” and no-one has suggested it should become so. Rather, she says, the commitment to link volunteering with development reflects broad agreement “from the very top” that volunteering can build skills and broaden understanding of the “impact of government programmes and policies on the ground.”

Wilmott, while also cautious of creating any formal link between volunteering and appraisals, suggests that it may be helpful to provide line managers with a “framework within which to have conversations about volunteering within an appraisal process” so that they feel able to recognise social activity when employees take part in it, without making it a requirement.

Skills-led volunteering

While “all volunteering is good”, says Benioff, there is a particular focus on skills-led volunteering: “Ministers are keen that civil servants really use their skills [to volunteer] in a more targeted way,” she says. Davis Smith notes that encouraging more people to use their professional skills in volunteering is one of the biggest challenges facing the voluntary community.

Here, as with volunteering overall, the SCS is leading by example. Encouraging more skills-led volunteering is partly a case of raising awareness about the opportunities to use professional skills, says Davis Smith, and of explaining “just how badly needed they are at the moment, given the resource challenges that many in the sector have”. But there is a balance to be struck: “Many people don’t want to use their day-to-day work skills when they’re volunteering; they actually want to do something different,” he adds.

Confronting the cuts

Mentioning resource challenges, Davis Smith touches on a key concern which managers may need to address: the perceived tension between growing a ‘civic service’, and cuts to voluntary and public sector funding. Many respondents used the ‘free text’ boxes in the CSW survey to raise concerns about public servants being asked to provide other services for free; one respondent indicated they would only be interested in volunteering “where public funding is not being cut”.

Benioff describes the fear that volunteers are being brought in to replace paid staff as “an age-old problem”. Organisations that use and support volunteers, she says, are “really careful to say: ‘That is not what volunteering is about’. [Volunteers] could never replace professional paid staff but they can complement what they do, and sometimes free up paid staff to do more of what they’re paid and trained to do.”

Nonetheless, as Brown recognises, many civil servants may feel “very uncomfortable” being asked to carry out voluntary work while charity funding is being cut. Civil servants may also feel uncomfortable if their volunteering is seen as providing political cover for funding cuts which they think are not in the interests of the voluntary sector. The key point, says Brown, is that volunteering is still a good thing to do, and it’s “entirely appropriate that we as public servants spend some time – even if it is employer-supported – alongside the people that we serve, so that we can ensure the services delivered to them are quality services”.

SCS seeking to encourage their staff to volunteer will need to maintain a number of balances: promoting employer-supported schemes while supporting individuals’ own commitments; emphasising the development benefits of volunteering without making it seem mandatory to career progress; and reassuring their cuts-weary staff that this isn’t all about replacing public servants, but enhancing public services.

For more on volunteering opportunites with CSBF, and to find out how the Fund is celebrating Volunteers Week, visit:www.csbf.org.uk/volunteer

Volunteering in the Fast Stream

Thirty-six per cent of fast streamers do voluntary work, according to CSW’s survey, but one Home Office fast streamer is hoping to change that. Finance and performance analyst

Mary-Kate Thomson set up ‘Volunteering the Fast Stream’ earlier this year to offer skills-focused placements that complement the Fast Stream’s talent-development ethos.
“This is a different way for fast streamers to drive their personal development and professional skills,” says Thomson. She is working with around a dozen charities to identify opportunities such as carrying out project evaluations, delivering workshops, or managing small projects. Thomson herself is sitting on a charity’s finance committee, which allows her to practise and develop the skills she uses in her day job.

Participants can take advantage of special leave to volunteer, and are encouraged to discuss the skills they develop while volunteering with their line managers. As the scheme is still at an early stage, says Thomson, they haven’t yet worked through any details of how it could be given more formal recognition. Thomson chose to focus on her own cohort of Home Office fast streamers to make the project manageable, but would eventually like to see it rolled out across other departments or offered to other grades.