‘Instead of training courses, let employees learn by doing good in the community’
Ed Mayo of UK social enterprise Pilotlight argues for a new model of corporate volunteering that will allow companies to ‘give back better’
What was your best day at work? When asking this question of people from time to time, I am reminded how much richness of motivation there can be when work is driven by the needs of others. It is this point of inspiration that I believe can open up new patterns of work in future, where employers can build in explicit time for staff to do good as part of their role.
Purpose matters. Psychoanalytic theories about work suggest that people need a clear concept of their “primary task” if they are to flourish and function well in the workplace. But there is often a profound mismatch between the language of purpose in modern business and the experience of it in people’s daily work. The language of teamwork in many an enterprise sits uncomfortably with the reality of hierarchies and inequalities of power and reward, the language of values in tension with the behaviours of corporate control and leadership. The truth is that every organisation has values, but they may just be the wrong ones. Power, status and reward, for example, are values in the dictionary sense of the word. But if they dominate organisational life, they shape workplace cultures that are unequal, untrusting and uncaring.
So, in a future work setting, can we learn the right values? The answer is not to send employees on a training course. It is to do something different, which is to set aside time for workers to do work in the wider community that they know to be good. The name for this is an old one – pro bono work – but in a new context...
Published by Reuters Events Sustainable Business, Read the full article here.