Voluntary and charity work policy

As part of your corporate social responsibility (CSR), you might want to grant staff a small number of paid or unpaid days off each year to undertake volunteering or charity work, or to allow them temporary flexible working hours to work on a particular volunteering project. Use our voluntary and charity work policy for this.

Charitable intentions

It’s a good way of encouraging your staff to assist charities or voluntary organisations if you’re seen to support their volunteer work by either giving them limited time off work or temporary flexible working hours for this purpose. Volunteering work can improve leadership and team work skills and increase staff retention levels. In turn, it can also raise your own profile, image and reputation in the community, help you improve the area in which you’re based, etc. It’s really up to you what type of volunteer work you want to approve or what voluntary organisations you want to be seen to support, so we’ve left it entirely at your discretion whether to accept an employee’s application or not, but it could include, for example, fundraising work for charities, voluntary organisations or community projects, environmental work and conservation projects and community care work. 

Time off work

The nature of the voluntary work undertaken will dictate what time off the employee may request but our Voluntary and Charity Work Policy provides for two options:

1. Paid or unpaid leave up to a maximum number of days per calendar year - we’ve suggested three, but you can make it more or less than this.
2. Temporary flexible working hours to enable work on a specific project to be carried out.

In relation to the first option, it’s entirely at your discretion whether to make this paid or unpaid leave.  We’ve deliberately confined the second option to temporary arrangements only - if the employee is looking for a more permanent change to their working hours, then that’s really something for your Flexible Working Policy to deal with (ours does include provision for the employee to apply for permanent flexible working to accommodate charity work). Our Voluntary and Charity Work Policy sets out a basic written application procedure for the employee to apply for time off or for temporary flexible hours. We’ve then provided that you have the absolute right to reject an application and given examples of the reasons why you might do so, but this list isn’t exhaustive. Your decision is final and we’ve given no right of appeal.