Helping Employees Help Others
Two major U.S. corporations--Xerox and IBM--allow their employees to take paid leave so they can help nonprofit organizations.
All 56,000 Xerox employees in the United States are eligible, provided they have the endorsement of their supervisors, says corporate spokesman Judd B. Everhart. Participants are picked by employees of all ranks, rather than by management.
About 60 applications come in annually for review by a five-member committee. The panel is composed of two veterans of the process and three others, selected to represent employee demographics and the geographic spread of the company’s facilities. They usually pick fewer than 10 people, keeping in mind that they can spare a total of $200,000 annually in salaries. (Therefore--as happened this year--an employee who asks for a year might be granted only nine months because of budget constraints.)
This year Xerox gave seven people leaves ranging from three months to a year. Three are from Rochester, N.Y., where Xerox was founded and where 14,595 of its employees work. Others are from California, Texas, Virginia and New Hampshire.
Since 1971, more than 400 employees have taken leaves, and all but a couple have returned to their corporate jobs and corporate salaries that usually can’t be matched by social service agencies scraping to get by.
“Xerox takes its role in the community very seriously and knows that it has an awful lot of employees that would like to give something back to their communities,” says Everhart, adding, “Xerox thinks it’s good for business; it’s good for the image of Xerox.”
IBM officials speak in the same terms of their 21-year-old program, which had 37 people on leave in 1991. But the leave application process is structured differently. Because of a more decentralized management structure, decisions about who goes on leave are up to local managers, says company spokeswoman Kathleen Ryan.
Theoretically, all 186,000 U.S. employees of IBM are eligible, but practice suggests some unwritten rules.
“Obviously you have to be someone who is performing well in your job and presumably have spent some time here,” Ryan says.
More than 1,000 employees have taken leave from IBM since the program began.
Unlike Xerox’s program, which provides leave only for social service-oriented organizations, IBM will help out any nonprofit group and at times has loaned people to federal government programs.
Assignments can be requested by the agency in need or suggested by company management.
