Volunteering at Tata

We found the perfect opportunity to launch Tata Engage— the 175th birth anniversary of Jamsetji Tata. Accordingly, on 3 March 2014, we launched the first Tata Volunteering Week and encouraged thousands of colleagues around the world to take officially sanctioned time off from work, for a half day to a full day, to spend with any non-profit of their choice. We did not stipulate or restrict what our colleagues could do; the idea was to let them pursue whatever they felt passionate about or wished to explore.

Eventually, we settled on organizing two Tata Volunteering Weeks every year, one coinciding with the founder’s birthday and the other kicking off with the International Day of Charity in the first week of September. Tata Volunteering Weeks would gradually extend to becoming volunteering months as colleagues and Tata companies sought more time to be able to ensure that more volunteers were able to contribute.

Volunteering initiatives encompass a wide variety of activities, such as energy-conservation drives, blood donation, medical camps, road-safety campaigns, beach cleaning, visits to orphanages and old-age homes, and career-counselling sessions for youth. Over time, not only Tata employees but also their family members and retired Tata colleagues joined the volunteering efforts. It warmed one’s heart to see the feedback of Tata volunteers after their exposure to different philanthropic initiatives.

The sign-ups for our first Tata Volunteering Weeks quickly crossed 100,000 employees. We were astounded by this number and delighted that so many colleagues were keen to experience the joy of giving. That then persuaded us to test a second flavour of volunteering, ProEngage, wherein Tata employees could deploy their individual skill sets to undertake pro bono projects to support non-profits.

These projects would initially be curated by the Tata Sustainability Group (TSG), our in-house sustainability centre of excellence, offered to volunteers and then matched with the volunteer skills on offer. There were some initial hiccups when otherwise well-meaning volunteers discovered the significant effort—all on personal time—they had to put in to support nonprofits. Similarly, there was considerable learning for the nonprofits on how to accurately describe the skills they needed and realistically define the time commitment they anticipated from volunteers in order to complete the projects they were offering. We found that it helped to create mutual support networks, with alumni sharing their experiences with every new batch of ProEngagers and also putting in place a system of ‘buddies’ so that volunteers did not feel they were working alone on their chosen projects. The programme eventually settled down to a very good rhythm.

I would often cite a great example of the marriage of ProEngage with the desire of our employees’ family members to make a contribution. This was the case of T.S. Sivasankaran, the father of an employee. After his retirement, he had been expressing to his family his desire to do something meaningful with his years of experience. When his daughter found out that Tata Engage offered skill-based volunteering opportunities to family members of Tata employees, she was thrilled. She immediately connected with the Tata Engage team and found out more about ProEngage. She then asked her father to register on the website and apply for a project of his choice.

From that day, there was no looking back for Sivasankaran. A career banker, he first worked with Vandana Foundation, a nonprofit which supported urban and rural poor through livelihood interventions and offered low-interest microfinance. Over a period of six months, he helped them develop customized microcredit products for the youth and for people from poor economic backgrounds. After completing this project, he volunteered to take on his next with another non-profit, Atma Education, to review and develop marketing content for them.

Around a thousand projects have now been delivered under ProEngage to non-profits, in areas ranging from the creation of management information systems to web design, development of marketing campaigns, creation of vocational skill curricula and pedagogy, and coaching and mentoring of non-profits. The ambition is to eventually move away from a curated model and towards a crowd-sourced one. In a crowd-sourced model, any employee should feel able to nominate any non-profit’s projects for pro bono activity. A system of reciprocal ratings can be devised, where volunteers rate the quality of projects offered by the nonprofits, which in turn rate the work done by the volunteers—very similar to the way in which the car-hire platform Uber works, where drivers and passengers can both rate each other. Once volunteers have a broad sense of how prior volunteering assignments have worked out with the non-profits they may be considering, they will feel far better equipped to work with them.

I do believe corporate volunteering is an idea whose time has come in India. We found that more than 99 per cent of Tata volunteers were happy to spend time undertaking some volunteering activity. This demonstrated that they were finding a level of selfactualization in what they were doing, and that volunteering appealed to their inner social instincts to help others. Importantly, for many of the younger Tata employees, the Volunteering Weeks and the pro bono projects we curated persuaded them that they were working for a truly enlightened employer. We discovered a truth about millennials—they are looking to work with employers who demonstrate a social conscience. Volunteering programmes, consequently, can prove to be talent-attraction tools in addition to the good they do.

A third flavour of volunteering we introduced, beyond the episodic Volunteering Weeks and ProEngage, was the idea that employees who had been in the group for a certain minimum period could volunteer to take extended sabbaticals of between six months to a year. They would be allowed to take them anywhere in the world, leveraging the Tata group’s global footprint. From a personal development standpoint, such sabbaticals could allow mid-career professionals searching for more meaning in their lives to take a break in their careers and dedicate their time and talent to helping communities in need. From the Tata group’s perspective, they could prove to be useful retention tools and leadership development opportunities, allowing hard-working and capable employees to take breaks from work without having to quit their jobs. It was also our expectation that these employees would come back refreshed with new skills and a better understanding of the needs and wants of individuals at the bottom of the pyramid.

Our biggest challenge, however, in deploying the long-term volunteering programme—which we had christened Engage Plus—lay in persuading the human resource chiefs of Tata companies to release talented professionals, on full pay, for periods of up to a year. They were concerned about the financial implications for their companies, because the work being done by a volunteer would need to be taken up by somebody else, perhaps a fresh hire, for the duration of the volunteer’s sabbatical. The more senior a volunteer, the greater the financial toll and the greater the difficulty in finding a capable and experienced replacement.

There was also the important question of what roles could be offered to the volunteers on their return to their parent organizations after their sabbaticals. If their replacements had shaped up and were doing a good job, it would be unfair to turf them out in order to accommodate the returning volunteers. At the time of writing, we had only managed to secure a few longterm placements of volunteers who have typically opted to work in disaster-hit areas like Uttarakhand, but I am confident that the numbers will grow over time. I see many more enlightened organizations offering such long-term volunteering opportunities across India in the years ahead.

For the last two years, Tata Engage has delivered over a million hours of volunteering support each year to non-profits across India. It has become India’s largest corporate volunteering programme, a matter of great personal satisfaction and pride for me.

Extracted from ‘The Brand Custodian – My Years with the Tatas’ (pages 116-120)