What is VTO, and why is it trending?

Businesses of all stripes are frequently looking for ways to give back ― donations, fundraising campaigns, partnerships and other strategies. But many are starting to turn to a different strategy: giving their employees time off to be used for volunteering, often called “volunteer time off”, or VTO.

“If one in 10 companies shared a business practice in common, would you sit up and take note? If the number moved to one in five, would you think seriously about following suit? What about one in four?” asked Atlassian’s Sarah Goff-Dupont. “That’s exactly the trajectory of one of the hottest employer trends: paid time off to volunteer.”

Goff-Dupont credits some of it to Millennials coming to dominate the workforce in the years leading up to Covid. “When coupled with a compelling, bullshit-free mission, VTO is one of the best ways to speak their language,” she said.

One advantage of simply granting VTO ― as opposed to a more structured program ― is that it diversifies where an organization’s charity efforts go, wrote Jessica Rodell at HBR. “Too often, executives focus their corporation’s volunteer programs around their own personal charitable-giving preferences,” she said.

As part of her research, she quoted one employee who echoed this, saying: “I would rather choose volunteer opportunities that I’m interested in and that I feel really need the extra help, not the ones that [my employer] has some association with.”

Some employers are even taking it a step further by making volunteering efforts part of employees’ annual performance markers. 

“​​One organization I had worked at previously decided to ditch the annual volunteer day,” explained Tonya Lagastra, head of ESG for Colliers Real Estate Management Services, in The Globe and Mail. “In its place, everyone was given the flexibility and tools they needed to contribute to their community, with one catch ― community goals would be included in annual goal setting and performance.

“Employees worked with their performance manager to set their philanthropic goals and agree to the flexibility needed to meet them,” she continued. “Then at the end of the year, the performance manager sat down with each employee to talk about what they did in the community and how these philanthropic activities contributed to their personal and professional development.”

Content written by Kieran Delamont for Worklife, a partnership between Ahria Consulting and London Inc. To view this content in newsletter form, click here.