Season of Giving: Ways to Share Your Light in the Workplace

We’re kicking off day four of our Season of Giving: 9 Ways to Share Your Light by highlighting how you can be more civically engaged through your workplace. This element in our Civic Circle focuses on the different ways that you can give back to your community by the choices you make in your career and daily work. Our Civic Engagement Research shows that over 40 percent of Generation Z and 25 percent of Millennials consider a company’s level of social responsibility and position on important issues before they apply for and/or accept a job with a potential employer. The choice of where you work and how companies choose to engage their employees has an impact on applicant pools, retention rates and employee satisfaction.  

Points of Light’s The Civic 50 initiative recognizes the 50 most community-minded companies in the nation annually. We are guiding the way for corporate citizenship and shining a light on businesses committed to doing good. Read more about United Parcel Service, our partner and one of the Civic 50 honorees, on our blog: UPS: In Service of Human and Civil Rights.  

What can you do to be civically engaged at work? Here are a few tips: 

• Research the social responsibility programs of the companies you are applying to or working for and see how much they give back to your own community and communities across the globe. 

• Find out if your employer has a volunteer program and sign up to participate. If they don’t have one, share our resources with your leadership and ask them to explore ways your company can get more civically involved. Check out Points of Light’s Community for Employee Civic Engagement for ideas.  

• If you are a business owner or hold a leadership position, explore the ways your organization can give back. You can motivate your supply chain to engage in this work with you, amplifying your impact.  

• We recently launched The Civic 50 survey, a benchmarking tool for companies in the United States with revenues of $1 billion or more, to measure their community engagement and social impact. Encourage your company to take the survey and see how they measure up.

At Points of Light, we believe that companies, their employees, partners, vendors and customers are critical to drive transformative social change in communities across the globe. We encourage you to learn more about how we work with companies around the world.