Why Volunteering is Good Business

According to  Statics Canada in 2010, volunteer hours across Canada was the equivalent to over 1 Million full time jobs, or approximately 2 Billion “working” hours.  With a majority of these hours being donated to charity and Not For Profit Organizations.  It is estimated that almost 70% of all Canadians will give their time to volunteer at some point or another.

All that said, the most expensive commodity a business/person has is their time, but what is the cost of  community relations, company moral, loyalty and retention.  In the end these can be priceless in the eyes of business.  Research shows that when Business and volunteerism combine, the entire community wins.  When volunteering is being put to work, in varying degrees, as a strategic asset to help achieve business goals, including managing and changing culture, strengthening the brand, building external relationships, and improving employee engagement.  Outside of these several other benefits can be attributed to the combination of business and volunteering, including

  • Skill Development
  • Leadership Training
  •  Increased Performance and Productivity
  • Community and Social Awareness
  • Outside Networking
  • Expression of Values
  • Increase Collaboration

The list potential benefits is only as big as your imagination.  People by nature tend to flock to similar values, and by linking your brand, your employees, or just your time to something local and meaningful, speaks at a greater volume then money can buy.  However, there is one important caveat to making volunteerism work for any business.  It is simple, the relationship between business and any charity or not for profit needs to be true and without falsehood.  The partnership needs to be genuine to the businesses morals, values and must truly benefit all those involved to achieve the desired outcomes.

We live in a time and age were information is at our finger tips, and finding the right organization is as easy as understanding what would be a good fit for you, your business, your employees and your community.  To return to the 2010 Statistics Canada Report on Volunteering, they found that the bulk of total volunteer hours (66%) were given to five types of non-profit and charitable organizations: those involved in sports and recreation had the largest share (19% of total hours), followed by social services (18%), religion (15%) education and research (9%) and health (5%).

Its never too early or too late to get involved in something… the only question is when?

 

Lucky Penny

National Lucky Penny Day is May 23rd, will that be your lucky day

Find a penny, pick it up, and all the day you’ll have good luck.”

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 A Lucky Penny From Me to You!

Give a Penny to a Friend, and your luck will never End.”

Quote author unknown

Procrastination

Procrastination is the practice of carrying out less urgent tasks in preference to more urgent ones, or doing more pleasurable things in place of less pleasurable ones, and thus putting off impending tasks to a later time, sometimes to the “last minute” before a deadline.

Is procrastination a good or an evil…Which quote fits you best?

“Never put off for tomorrow, what you can do today.”
– Thomas Jefferson

or

“Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.”
– Mark Twain

Procrastination is so easy to come by, distraction is now literally at our finger tips.  How easy is it to get lost in the world of the on-line abyss, with email, social media, and YouTube.  (who has not wasted hours watching screaming goat videos), but believe it or not the art of procrastination has been around as long as there has been someway to record human behaviours.  Why do we purposely add  the additional stresses caused by procrastination?  Especially in this stress ridden, hurry up and wait laden society.  We all know that stress has negative impacts on every aspect of our health, including physical, mental, social and professional. However, knowing all this we do we all do it anyway.  So why?

According to Tim Pychyl, a procrastination researcher at Carleton University in Ottawa, The more aversive a task is to you, the more you’ll resist it, and the more likely you are to procrastinate. Pychyl, in his research, identified a number of task characteristics that make you more likely to procrastinate. Tasks that are aversive tend to:

  • Be boring
  • Be frustrating
  • Be difficult
  • Lack personal meaning and intrinsic rewards
  • Be ambiguous (you don’t know how to do it)
  • Be unstructured

The more negative emotions you show toward a certain task, the more likely you are to procrastinate.  He describes procrastination as the gap between intention and action…a weakness of will if you may.  Who wants to spend time doing something from the above mentioned list when you could be doing something that gives a more self gratifying feeling.  Accounting Vs. Reading a book, Reading a book Vs. Watching your favourite TV show, Watching your favourite TV show Vs. going to lunch with friends…But in the end the accounting still needs to get done, no matter how much you put it off.

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