There is lots of talk about the importance of workplace giving and workplace volunteering. Ministers of all parties wax lyrical about payroll giving (ignoring the fact that it’s widely disliked by fundraisers). The Green paper enthuses about the potential for volunteering in the workplace.

Yet employee volunteering fills most charities with dread. There is nothing more difficult to deal with than an employer who rings up a charity offering 30/300/3000 employees who want to do a bit of volunteering as part of their team-building on Thursday afternoon in three weeks time. Charities quietly (for fear of upsetting their corporate partners) dislike employee volunteering while companies are much more enthusiastic.

The problem is that money is so wonderfully flexible. You can bank it or spend it, hoard it or use it whenever and wherever you want. Time is a much more restricted asset and there is no fudging how it’s used – the volunteers will all know exactly how their time is spent. A common challenge for corporate partnerships is the differing priorities of charity and company. Companies want something that will motivate staff and build morale or the skills of employees. Charities like money best.

Even from the company side, employee volunteering is far from easy. For nearly five years now nfpSynergy has had a company policy of giving each employee 5 days of paid volunteering time. Doesn’t that make us wonderful? Well no not really because it didn’t work: very few staff used their volunteering days. And this is despite the fact that almost everybody who works for us is very committed to the charities and non-profits.

So why didn’t people use their volunteering days? The answer is simple. Five days is ‘diddly squat’ in the world of volunteering. It was like telling people they could go and buy a free lunch on the company but only giving them 10p with which to do. People were keen but volunteering opportunities often required a regular commitment - and more than five days. Usually much more.

So now we have changed the system. We have a volunteering days ‘bank’. Everybody still gets five days but the days are then pooled into a corporate pot of 100 days from which anybody can draw until they are all gone. In other words one person can claim many more days than five days. This has moved us forward and we have one staff member who is volunteering one day a fortnight at a Red Cross refugee advice centre – she has used up five days just getting her induction. And we have another staff member who has joined the board of a charity and will probably use about ten days over the course of the year. Even so it looks like we won’t use all our days this year but we will have increased our usage from about 10 to about 50 days.

We have learnt two things from our own experience of volunteering. Firstly that volunteering is lumpy and if we want our staff to volunteer we need to be happy that a few staff will do a lot of our volunteering rather than all staff volunteering equally.

Secondly the right role is everything. If people don’t have a role that appeals to them and it doesn’t fit with the rhythm of their daily and work lives then employee volunteering won’t work. Our Red Cross volunteer has a PhD in refugee studies so her volunteer role matches her expertise!

We will keep trying to innovate in our approach to employee volunteering – because if we don’t we might look good on paper but we’ll be doing nothing in practice.