The Charity Day the Board Didn't Want

About 20 years ago, a young man on my team came to me with a problem. He wanted to volunteer. He just didn't have the time.

So I gave the whole team time. A half-day of paid charity time accrued for each month of work, totaling six charity days a year, to be used at the discretion of the employee.

He banked all six days and went to Mexico to build houses with Habitat for Humanity. He came back transformed, and he stood up in front of the team and told them about it.

Did it cost us anything? Not really.

How do you justify paid volunteer time to a board?

You show them.

I owned 80% of that company, and I still had to sell it to a skeptical board. A board's job is to ask what a policy costs, and a policy that sounds like "pay people not to work" invites the question.

So I let them see it. They sat in on the employee presentations, where people told the team what they'd done. I showed them that turnover went down. I showed them that payroll didn't change, because the team covered for each other and nobody needed overtime. And customers loved it.

That's a board-level case: lower turnover, flat payroll, and happier customers. The board came around.

Why does a small policy have such a big return?

Because it changes what the job means to the people doing it.

The policy fed itself. One employee went to Habitat. Another picked Big Brothers. Another went to Junior Achievement. It turned into a friendly competition over who could do the most good, and the team ran it themselves.

Here's what told me it worked. Nobody ever came back and said, "Give me 10% or I'm leaving." It was built into the culture.

How would you try it in your own company?

Start small enough that the cost question answers itself. A half-day a month is a rounding error on payroll.

Make one rule: when people come back, they tell the team what they did. Those presentations did more to sell the policy than anything I could have said, to the board and to the rest of the team.

Then measure the two numbers a board cares about. Watch turnover, and watch whether payroll moves when people are out. If the team covers for each other the way mine did, you'll have your case inside a year.

What does this have to do with resilience?

Everything I teach comes back to three legs: Body, Business, and Being. This policy sat right where Business and Being meet. It was a business decision that made the company stronger, and it gave people a way to positively impact others, which is the core value I try to live by.

It's also an example of Return on Joy. Six half-days a year was a tiny cost basis. What came back was a transformed young man, a team that wanted to stay, and a culture that sold itself.

What's one small policy you could try that your board would question, and that you could prove out in a year?

~b