“Corporate Volunteering” was the subject of the fourth Fireside Talk on Corporate Citizenship at the Munich office of the BMW Stiftung Herbert Quandt. Featuring Prof. Dr. Thomas Maak, Professor for Leadership and Responsibility at ESADE Business School in Barcelona, and Peter Kusterer, Director Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs at IBM Deutschland, the discussion in front of some 50 guests from business and society was moderated by Dr. Frank W. Heuberger, co-founder of the Center for Corporate Citizenship Deutschland (CCCD).

Professor Maak, scientific advisor to the “Ulysses” corporate volunteering program at PricewaterhouseCoopers AG, presented his findings. Generally, learning is most successful when it is “service learning”, the combination of professional learning and social commitment, i.e. when it is experiential, processual, emotional, and holistic. Through the Ulysses program, executives were assigned for three months to aid projects worldwide, e.g. to an initiative in Fuyang run by “Save the Children”, an NGO active in China, where they worked in international teams of three, contributing a variety of competencies. In his study, Professor Maak was able to identify various learning experiences of the volunteers: gaining a more global perspective, developing individual character, with a key emphasis on relational intelligence, and becoming aware of everyone’s social responsibilities.

Peter Kusterer talked about IBM’s corporate volunteering program from a pragmatic, entrepreneurial perspective. With its “Corporate Service Corps” project, IBM seeks to embed key competencies such as, e.g., IT skills, in international aid projects. All IBM employees are entitled to apply. The selected volunteers will be part of an international, on-site team for a four-week period and carry out their own projects during that time. Among the key learning experiences that Kusterer was able to observe are an increase in independence, flexibility, and individual initiative, and the realization that it is possible to combine professional and social commitment.

The learning experiences are considered important at IBM and may also have a positive influence on the company and its specific culture. At IBM, 1,500 employees have already participated in this program; currently, it is too early, however, to assess the impact this might have on the company.

On the issue of the development of corporate volunteering in the next decade, Kusterer said that he wished for volunteering to be more competence-based and supported by society. Agreeing with Kusterer, Professor Maak said that, in the future, he would like to see this kind of commitment embedded in the DNA of a company and even society as a whole.