Don't Let Volunteering Drain Your Best People

Giving back does not draw a straight line to better performance. Done carelessly, it drains the people you can least afford to lose.

Adam Grant, Wharton’s highest-rated professor, laid out the paradox in Give and Take. Givers populate both the top and the bottom of the performance rankings. What separates the champs from the chumps is how and when they give, not whether they give at all.

"Across occupations, if you examine the link between reciprocity styles and success, the givers are more likely to become champs, not only chumps." — Adam Grant, Give and Take, p. 7

Grant sorts people into givers, takers, and matchers. Givers put others’ needs first. Takers put their own first. Matchers keep a ledger. This is not about virtue. It is a lever that either lifts a team or bleeds it, depending on where the giving goes.

A manager’s job is to point that giving at something that pays back. Two structures do it well.

1. Corporate philanthropy that travels

Corporate-owned non-profits are multiplying, and they are always short on volunteers. ICVolunteers, the International Communications Volunteers, is one: an international non-profit specializing in communications that promotes economic growth and environmental stewardship in developing countries. It runs conferences and manages communications for events. It does not set out to change any one company’s culture. It changes the employee, and the employee changes the room they work in. You notice it on a resume, and you notice it in the person. That is the same loyalty math behind engaging and retaining top employees.

2. Volunteer programs that pay back at home

Disengagement is expensive. A 2011 Gallup survey found 71% of US workers not engaged and 19% actively disengaged, a drag that shows up in output long before anyone runs a survey.

A local program channels that energy. An after-school robotics club gives your engineers somewhere to spend their tinkering, gives local kids a reason to care, and ties your culture to the neighborhood you operate in. The goodwill is real, and so is the retention.

3. What comes back

Engaged employees invest more of themselves. They commit to the business, promote its mission, and carry its brand into rooms you will never enter. They are more motivated, more efficient, and less prone to absenteeism. The same instinct that makes someone a giver at a robotics club makes them a giver at their desk, pointed this time at work that compounds, the way steady investment in people does when you promote them for long-term success.