Volunteering in the banking sector

Volunteering is a way through which employees can create positive social impact, whilst simultaneously developing professional skills and connecting to the communities they serve. While it is natural to think this should have positive spillovers in the workplace, there is almost no evidence that this is the case. We hypothesize that the take-up of volunteering triggers the individual accumulation of altruism, which in turn affects employees’ willingness to contribute to the common good both inside and outside the workplace. Our collaboration with the Volunteering team of a large bank whilst it launches its new volunteering platform tests this hypothesis. We send an email to a random sample of the bank’s UK-offices, informing employees of a new volunteering platform that the bank is launching. We also randomize the intensity of the treatment – that is, the percent of teams within an office that are treated. The random assignment of the email should create exogenous variation in employees’ participation in volunteering, which allows us to estimate the causal effect of volunteering on a variety of outcomes, including employees capacity to connect to their colleagues, the bank as a company, their customers, and society at large. We decided to also randomize the intensity of treatment across offices in order to measure additional social multiplier effects. If individuals in offices that receive high-intensity treatments see significantly different long-run outcomes than those in receive low-intensity treatment office, this provides evidence that social dynamics are important in the individual propensity of being altruistic.