Today’s post comes from Bea Boccalandro, President of VeraWorks, frequent speaker on corporate community involvement and author of “The End of Employee Volunteering: A Necessary Step to Substantive Employee Engagement in the Community.”

Imagine an Employee Volunteer Program (EVP) that involves every employee. Now imagine an EVP that involves every employee every week. Finally, imagine that the sustained service these employees offer is more effective at fighting hunger, illiteracy and otherwise improving societal causes than what employees could do on their own. That is, the employer support allows these employees to offer higher-skilled, better equipped or otherwise more effective services.

If every one of your employees delivered such high-impact service on a weekly basis, would the school your company adopted still have any third graders who couldn’t read? Would your company still suffer from low employee morale?

It’s easy to see how such a massive and sustained force for good could transform both our communities and our workplaces. But is it possible to transform our workplaces into such a force for good?

It is possible. We can make employee volunteering highly popular and highly effective if, paradoxically, we are willing to turn it into something unlike volunteering: a component of employees’ commercial job.

Some companies are showing the path to this highly popular and highly effective employee community involvement. When housekeeping staff at Caesars Palace hotel in Las Vegas show up to work, they can choose to fight preventable infections that kill 9,000 children a day.

Caesars Entertainment’s community involvement program encourages housekeeping staff to collect soap from guest rooms. The Clean the World Foundation – which also receives financial support from Caesars – then sterilizes, recycles and distributes the soap to impoverished families across the globe. By making a small adjustment to his job, an employee in a Nevada hotel can help a child in an African village stay healthy.

Meanwhile, in Florida, FedEx drivers spot and identify invasive snake species that damage to sensitive wilderness areas. FedEx drivers scan trees and branches on their delivery route. If the driver spots a Burmese Python or other nonnative snake, her GPS allows her to notify the local authorities or nonprofit organization of the snake’s precise location for removal. Thus, participating FedEx drivers help rid the environment of a damaging species every workday.

Another surprising integration of community involvement into a mainstream corporate job takes place at outdoor clothing manufacturer and retailer, Patagonia. Walk into the Washington, DC, Patagonia store and you are offered as many options for doing good – e.g. how to recycle your clothing, leave a light footprint when hiking or carpool – as you are ski pants. Patagonia’s sales team members help build environmental awareness as part of their job.

Are Caesars housekeeping, FedEx courier and Patagonia sales staff engaged in volunteering? They are not. None of the mentioned practices comply with all three tenets that define volunteering: altruism, non-remuneration and voluntary participation.

All three companies admit that these programs benefit the business through employee engagement, employee skill development, PR or otherwise. Thus, on the altruism requirement alone, none of the above programs qualify as volunteering.

Furthermore, employees at all these companies receive pay for their community service and, thus, the non-remuneration requirement is not met. Finally, participation in Patagonia’s program is not voluntary. It is in the sales job description.

What Caesars housekeeping, FedEx courier and Patagonia sales staff do is not volunteering. Yet these departments are unquestionably involving a large portion of their workforces in a valuable service to societal causes. What’s more, these employee non-volunteers support societal causes more effectively than what they could do as volunteers.

Detaching the community service from their jobs would dramatically diminish the value of the services. Without Caesars’ soap, FedEx’s trucks and GPS equipment and Patagonia’s access to foot traffic these employees could not as effectively reduce the spread of disease, rid a natural habitat of invasive species or promote environmental protection.

The innovative practices of Caesars, FedEx and Patagonia put the fantasy of “every employee making high-impact contributions to societal causes every week” tantalizingly close to reality.

What makes this dream possible is incorporating volunteering to employees’ everyday jobs. Yes, this changes the character of volunteering to something some might consider less noble. Indeed, it might take out of the realm of volunteering altogether. This non-volunteering, however, is undoubtedly highly effective at helping children read, raising families out of poverty and otherwise serving societal causes. And what could be more noble than doing our best to improve the lot of humanity?

Learn more about Employee Volunteering Beyond Volunteering by participating in the webinar on October 25^th at 3pm EST.  Register now for the webinar.