Employee Volunteering Health & Safety Survey
Employer perspective
In January 2009, Volunteering New Zealand conducted a short survey on health and safety issues related to volunteers involved in the employee volunteering programmes. Results published below are solely giving the indications of trends in New Zealand, and are not to provide any scientific statistical significance.
We received 14 responses out of which 84.6% were national businesses. 46.2% responses were coming from the employers operating at the national level, 30.8% in Wellington, 15.4% in Canterbury and 7.7% in Auckland and Marlborough respectively.
Thirteen responses are coming from businesses which do have an employee volunteering programme. 69.2% of respondents stated they provide paid time/leave for employees to undertake volunteering. 46.2% arrange the projects for their employees to participate in, 23.1% let employees to choose their own projects and 53.8% offer both options to their employees.
76.9% of the respondents use brokering services in order to arrange projects with community/voluntary organisations. All of them use the services of regional volunteer centres.
Only 23.1% of those having employee volunteering programme have formalised written health and safety guidelines for staff involved in the programmes. Those who have formalised guidelines, they all contain health and safety briefings for employees before participating in a volunteering project, as well as the procedures for action and follow up reporting in the event of an employee being injured while on a volunteering project. Only half of them have a health and safety good practice checklist and/or are obtaining information from the host community/voluntary organisation on potential health and safety hazards at the host’s site. 33.3% are ready to share the guidelines with the other employers.
If an employee was injured while participating in paid employee volunteering away from his/her normal workplace, 100% of respondents answering the question consider the employee to be ‘at work’. If the injured employee was absent from work as a result of the injury, ten respondents would pay wage/salary for the first week of absence. Three were not sure, and one would only if the employee has sick leave available.
Hosting Community Organisation perspective
This survey was conducted in May 2009 as part of the Employee Volunteering Health and Safety project run by Volunteering NZ with support from Mobil Oil NZ. The purpose of the survey was to obtain information from community organisations on their health and safety practices for occasions when they are assisted by individual employee volunteers, groups of employee volunteers or other groups from the community (e.g. Church and youth groups offering to undertake projects).
The results of this survey are available here.