Serving Up the Perfect Team-building Experience
Creating an exceptional team-building experience was the natural, although unplanned, result of providing an opportunity for Knowlagent employees to participate in community service together at MUST Ministries.
Employees came back to the office after spending time serving food or decorating the shelter saying how much fun they had. People whose paths rarely crossed simply due to the nature of the business worked side by side on a project creating an opportune moment to learn more about each other.
Due to these various events, community service opportunities really soared here at Knowlagent. Desiring to help even more, employees took the initiative to start clothing drives, raise money for bus tickets, purchase bikes and participate in other service activities.
Serve Together, Stay Together
Providing these service opportunities for employees also resulted in increased tenure. We found that employees want to work at Knowlagent, and they want to stay. The giving culture lends itself to be a positive work environment.
Community Service in Five Steps
We offer five easy steps for implementing a program at your organization and we built this based on our work at MUST Ministries, which showed us what can be accomplished when a company dedicates time for service.
- Pick a local, non-profit organization in need of volunteers. It can be a homeless shelter, animal rescue, foster care, nursing home, programs for children with disabilities or whatever cause excites you. To find the right organization to help, you can simply conduct online research – or even ask your employees what’s “near and dear” to their hearts.
At Knowlagent, we chose a homeless shelter for men, women and children.
- Find out what type of support is needed. Does the organization need volunteers to serve meals, plan birthday parties for kids, play games, etc.? Ensure you understand their real need and can help them meet that need.
Knowlagent’s involvement started by purchasing, preparing and serving meals to the homeless and conducting quarterly drives for various needs. By learning more about the organizations, employees identified other ways to help those living in the shelter. For example, they discovered people needed assistance with transportation. Knowing the need was great, employees raised money to buy bus tickets, bicycles and strollers.
Serving lunch at MUST requires the following volunteers:
- Two shoppers to purchase ingredients prior to event
- Two grillers
- Four cooks to prepare burgers, hot dogs, beans and potato salad
- Four servers to roll up their sleeves and serve food, cookies, and drinks with kindness
- Determine how much time your organization can dedicate on an ongoing basis. Make sure your commitment is one that you can live up to and one that will help the organization.
Knowlagent dedicates time on a quarterly basis. This gives employees four opportunities to serve the community together. Additionally, employees receive five paid days off to volunteer at an organization of their choice.
- Identify internal ambassadors to help manage the project year long. Program ambassadors will naturally emerge as your program takes off, but you will need a few cheerleaders across all levels of your company when you first roll out your program.
At Knowlagent, one employee manages the relationship with the organization, while another employee coordinates participation internally.
- Solicit (or provide) leadership support and involve as many employees as possible. For your executive team, this means emphasizing the importance of community service during company meetings and encouraging employee participation. Consider providing paid "community service days." Ensure senior managers buy into the program and lead by example.
For your employees, you need to give them the ability to share their ideas on how your company can help your selected organization. But don’t stop there. Select non-management employees to lead programs.
If you would like to talk about this in detail, please send an email to: service@knowlagent.com. We’re happy to share ideas and our experiences.
