Traditionally, paid leave has been reserved for sickness, parenthood and vacations. But now, there is another opportunity to give employees the day - or even the week - off.

Corporate volunteering involves helping your staff get involved in helpful community and environmental activities, sometimes with paid leave. But as some more traditional managers scratch their heads and try to work out why they'd want their staff away from their desks even more than they already are, some execs are already actively encouraging this new trend in corporate philanthropy.

RightNow Technologies, a customer relationship management software firm based in Bozeman Montana, has heavily embraced the corporate volunteering ethic. The company grants its employees one week of paid leave each year to go and volunteer in the community. It also organises charitable events to help marshal its employees in the right direction. Two summers ago, for example, it organised an initiative called The House That RightNow Built, teeming with Habitat for Humanity to help build houses for the needy.

It's nice to know that a company's heart is in the right place, but in the ruthless world of business, is there room for such altruism, and do companies receive anything in return, other than a warm fuzzy feeling?

"From a cultural perspective, with the type of company we're trying to build, it's an incredible attractor to the right type of candidates," says VP of marketing Jason Mittelstaedt. "It's also a great retention mechanism, when employees feel that they work for a great company and they're able to contribute back to the community. On top of that it really helps the community's view of the company."

IBM UK's corporate citizenship and corporate affairs manager Mark
Wakefield agrees that corporate volunteering systems can help to buoy up the community's, and of course customers', view of a company.

The firm runs On Demand Community, a four year-old corporate volunteering initiative that includes over 100,000 members. "Volunteering can take people into sections of society that they may not have much experience otherwise," Wakefield says. "Most employers tend to recruit people like themselves, and getting out to engage different people with different viewpoints is a good way of understanding how people think and feel, and what opinions they may have of your products and services." He also feels that it gives employees the chance to practise their soft skills in ways that they might not otherwise do.

Most of these benefits are intangible and difficult to measure. Staff attrition rates will be affected by more than whether the company runs a volunteer scheme, making it difficult to simple staff turnover figures as a success metric. However, in Rightnow's case, the company gets to see some hard benefits on the balance sheet, because it can get a tax break for the money that it invests in terms of employee hours. IBM's financial benefits are more limited, because although it operates a corporate volunteering programme, it doesn't allow employees to take time off for it - it asks them to devote their own time to volunteering.

That's an interesting one; how can a company that doesn't actually give employees time off in the week to do good deeds claim that it runs a corporate volunteering programme? Wakefield argues that the value in its scheme lies in its coordination skills. "They may be able to find some volunteering opportunities either organised by IBM in the area they're interested in, or we may be able to find some volunteer opportunities that have been posted by IBM staff on the opportunities database," he says.

The company also provides training tools for volunteering, and sometimes offers financial and intellectual property resources for employees to use when helping out in other organisations. "Finding companies that would be willing to give their staff five days or two weeks a year of volunteering time would be fairly exceptional, even at the upper end," he says, adding that staff time is valuable at IBM and that they're a busy bunch.

It's probably harder for smaller firms to offer such services, but RightNow seems to be the little company that could - and it's scaling its volunteer activity as the organisation grows. The company has expanded to around 750 employees in just a few years. However, the financial hit involved in giving everyone a week off may not be as severe as it sounds - not everyone takes advantage of the volunteering opportunity, and Mittelstaedt doesn't know how many do. All the company can do is encourage them to get involved, he says.

What's interesting about these two firms is that while one effectively pays its staff to volunteer and takes a fairly hands-off approach, the other withholds the funds, but does its best to steer employees into a volunteering strategy in line with its own goals. RightNow is just as happy for its people to go and work in a soup kitchen or on an environmental project as it is for them to go and teach students about technology, for example. IBM's volunteering goals meanwhile are more focused towards its own ends. One focus area is volunteering in educational establishments, for example, a move that in the long term could help tackle the technology sector's on-going skills crisis.

"Supporting educational activities is one of IBM's particular areas of focus and interest because we see it as a fairly essential building block for the development and stability of society," says Wakefield. "IBM benefits because there are better educated people in society which increases the range of people from whom we are able to recruit in the future." A better educated society also makes for a generally more prosperous business community, he adds. All in all, having employees assist in schools in their own time to help create IBM's next generation of employees seems like a win-win situation for Big Blue.

Firms from all sectors can emulate IBM's approach and look to tackle recruitment problems by supporting educational schemes, while companies with an environmental strategy could similarly help promote their initiatives amongst employees by running volunteering programmes that boast a green flavour.

Such is the current interest in corporate volunteering these days that there are even non-profit organisations focused purely on hooking up the needy with the plentiful. Volunteermatch [www.volunteermatch.org] has been in operation since 1996, and online since 1998. It charges companies that want to provide their volunteer employees with access to its database of opportunities, and channels those resources through to non-profit beneficiaries for free.

The company, which is 75 per cent self-sustaining from its own fees (the remainder coming from grants and donations), operates separate programmes for individual volunteers and corporate customers, and functions largely in the US, although there are some international services, "We just signed last week a human resources company here in the US with just 500 employees," says spokesperson Robert Rosenthal. "It's a pretty good example of how our small to medium business programme is starting to grow."

An important point to remember about corporate volunteering is that the benefits will be largely 'soft', and companies are unlikely to recover in any measurable sense the financial outlay that they make if they give employees paid leave. However, those intangible benefits can often be remarkably powerful in terms of branding and simply making staff feel good about what they do. If a company wants to increase its ethical credentials, it is difficult to think of a better way to start.