Page 101 - Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with the Principles

72 Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work

Tips for a Great Community Service Project While donating money
to good causes is admirable, doing so will have far less impact
on increasing employee pride than involving your employees
in a community service project. In addition, such events often
become powerful team-building experiences during which peo-
ple form bonds and break boundaries in ways that simply cannot
occur in an office environment. Although the work is to help oth-
ers, the organization benefits greatly in the process. Here are a
few tips to consider while planning community service projects:

1. Involve your employees right from the start by having
them submit suggestions. Elect an employee committee
to review and select the project. Consider making a small
financial or product/service donation to charities that
were not selected.
2. Focus on projects that can be completed in one day.
People feel best and take the greatest pride in seeing
projects from beginning to end. If beginning and
finishing the entire project in one day is not possible,
such as with building a house, try being responsible for
one identifiable part, such as putting up the frame.
3. The more concrete and longer lasting the outcome of
the effort, the more inspiring. For example, picking up
trash along a highway is great, but it doesn’t have nearly
the same long-term impact as helping to construct a
playground or planting trees. People want to point to
something and say, “I helped do that.”
4. Make sure that the project is well coordinated and
organized. Find the best project managers in the
company and enroll them in planning and organizing the
event. There’s nothing worse than people showing up to
do a community service project and then just standing
around drinking coffee.