Karen Tighe, Head of Community Engagement at Lloyds Banking Group, shares how offering employees the opportunity to share their skills with charities is improving colleagues' confidence and skills and benefitting the workplace as a whole.
11 June 2024
“If our hopes of building a better and safer world are to become more than wishful thinking, we will need the engagement of volunteers more than ever.”
Powerful words indeed from Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations and it’s certainly something that here at Lloyds Banking Group, we seek to embody. Our ‘why’ drives us – in helping Britain prosper, this includes the impact we can make in the communities we serve.
“It’s just part of our DNA”. Words I often hear from colleagues, and words that are music to my ears in my role leading our Community Engagement strategy. I’m often bowled over by the generosity of spirit, dedication and compassion of my colleagues in their support of a wide variety of charities, in communities across the country.
Karen Tighe, Head of Community Engagement at Lloyds Banking Group
Being a financial services organisation, we love numbers, so here are a few: our colleagues contributed over 90,000 hours of volunteering last year, the vast majority in skills based volunteering for communities across the UK and the Channel Islands.
Lloyds Banking Group supports four charitable foundations: the Bank of Scotland Foundation, Halifax Foundation for Northern Ireland, Lloyds Bank Foundation for the Channel Islands and Lloyds Bank Foundation for England and Wales. Across our foundations, there are currently nearly 700 colleagues volunteering with charities as mentors, trustees, supporting one-off problem solving sessions with charity CEOs, and working more deeply on projects for six months at a time.
Why? The benefits are wide ranging and deep for our colleagues, for our business and for the charities we seek to serve.
That said, we haven’t always understood the true potential of skills based volunteering. If I think back to our approach even five or six years ago, our starting point was, (and will always be) to respond to charity need. We focussed on the logistics of making a match, probably based on geography or time available. We wouldn’t have spent much time thinking about the strategy involved or the benefits to our colleagues and the business.
Today, we have a shared view of the role of successful volunteering for everyone involved, whether colleague, charity, business or Foundation. We have invested in diversifying the offer for our colleagues and charities so they can get involved, whether motivated by time available, theme or cause, the community they want to support of the skills they want to share. Often, it’s a combination of some or all of these things. This range is really important to help deepen the experience and, in turn, the impact.
The real lightbulb moment came when we started to appreciate the benefit that skills based volunteering has on colleagues’ own development and experience. Volunteering is now a much more prominent part our workplace experience. We’ve strived to place volunteering alongside other forms of developing and applying skills. This has involved spending time with leaders and colleagues, to help them appreciate the value of volunteering and to make space for it for their teams.
We see how volunteering is growing our employees’ confidence and know that it broadens perspectives and creates connection in communities and across our business. It might be a reason that people want to join our business and I hope that it is a reason to stay.
One colleague captured the impact that her volunteering has had on her confidence and skills:
“I recently applied for a new job and during the interview I turned to examples and evidence from my volunteering experience for several of my answers. I feel certain that the skills I’ve developed though volunteering have played a significant part in securing my promotion.”
And hearing from her manager, she too has noticed the positive impact of her volunteering:
“It’s been great to see her proactively managing her skills and development through volunteering – she’s not only benefitted the charity by sharing her skills and advice, but the experience has deepened her confidence and leadership skills and helped her communicate more confidently and with greater impact.”
Volunteers from Lloyds Banking Group visit Skills Enterprise in Newham
We know that there’s still more we can do to make the experience as simple and seamless as possible for charities and colleagues to connect with each other. And we want to truly understand the collective impact of time spent volunteering. These are challenges that we relish and we’ll work collaboratively with our colleagues, partners and charities to make progress.
Our support for our four independent charitable foundations is unwavering and I’m delighted that the Lloyds Bank Foundation for England and Wales has reached such an important milestone in celebrating ten years of skills volunteering with our colleagues. Here’s to many more years of collaboration, support and to making a difference together.
At Lloyds Bank Foundation, we have just launched a report sharing our learning from a decade of delivering skilled volunteering programmes so that other organisations can take up skills based volunteering, be it volunteers, employers or charities. Read the report here.
Find out more about the development support we offer charities with skills based volunteering.
