Skills for Employability Enhanced Through Community Engagement

The purpose of the Laboratory is to highlight how employee engagement enhances skills for employability throughout Europe, and how this in turn contributes to the main drivers and goals of the European Jobs and Growth agenda, particularly in the areas of education, skills and employability.

Leaders    
Citi KPMG Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer
Facilitator  
BITC ENGAGE

Project Description

The main thrust of this Lab is to explore and demonstrate the value of employee community involvement in terms of improving and developing employability skills and competencies, as well as enhancing diversity and social cohesion.

By collecting examples of outstanding employee involvement programmes involving cross-sectoral collaboration in Europe, the Lab aims to show: the value of this form of community investment; its economic and social impact; how employee volunteering promotes competitive and sustainable enterprise; its contribution to the EU growth and jobs agenda and its role in delivering companies' corporate responsibility commitments.

This Laboratory has two principle outputs. The first is a study on employee community engagement (ECE) which includes the collection of best practice and case studies demonstrating the impact of these programmes (Deadline: May 2008) and the second is the dissemination of the findings (Deadline: September 2008).

Objectives

The objectives are two fold: to raise awareness of the connection between skills for employability as it relates to employee engagement, to make recommendations on how to create a step-change in this arena, and help to establish best practice and leverage across the sectors to better enable further collaborative action.

We will show how employee community engagement can bring people together from all nationalities, religions, socio-economic backgrounds and age groups to make positive change and promote active, responsible citizenship. Such action is integral to European values of democracy, solidarity, and participation (From the European Volunteer Centre).

We will also demonstrate how joint operational projects and networks can be used to scale up the impact on employability (e.g. through geographical and/or sectoral expansion).

Currently Approaching our Second Stage (December 2007 - May 2008)

  • To highlight the effectiveness of Employee Engagement in addressing the EU employability agenda

  • To demonstrate how joint operational projects and networks between companies can be used to scale up impact on employability (e.g. through geographical and/or sectoral expansion)

  • To gather best practice on measuring the impact of employee community engagement, in relation to the employability agenda

Stages 3, 4 and 5: Implementation of an action plan, evaluation and communication.

Deliverable

This Laboratory will produce a Report on Employee Community Engagement Findings from across the EU. The production of this deliverable requires several different avenues of operation:

  • Business that are part of the BITC/ENGAGE network have been motivated to contribute by providing insight and feedback on their ECE work
  • Research is also being conducted through expert interviews. The experts have been identified as leaders in the field of community engagement across Europe
  • The collection of case studies from internal and external sources has brought in over 40 examples. These will be short-listed, so that the best practice examples may act as the practical basis of the Report

Lab Leaders

Citi; KPMG; Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer

Facilitator

BITC/ ENGAGE

Company Participants

Allen & Overy, DLA Piper and IBM. A whole range of companies and organisations has been reached through the participants for research purposes.

Stakeholders Participants:

ENGAGE community partners in Europe, CSR Europe (European Membership Organisation); CEV (umbrella organisation for European Volunteer Centres); Sodalitas (Italy), UPJ (Germany), Hestia (Checz Republic) and Center for Corporate Citizenship at the Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt.

EU Commission Participants

DG Employment European Commission

Contact Information

Chabuca Barnes, CSR Europe
+32 02 541 1620
cb@csreurope.org

Maria-Jose Subiela, BITC/Engage
+44 870 600 24 82
Maria-jose.subiela@bitc.org.uk

Milestones - 2008

  • 04 March: High-Level Meeting in Brussels - CEOs and other business leaders met to discuss their CSR contributions
  • 13 March: Update and Coordination conference call - review and discussion of expansion
  • 23 April: ENGAGE practitioners meeting -LAB was made the central focus here, to help raise awareness and to stimulate greater participation
  • 30 April: BITC/Engage Leadership Team meeting
  • 22-23 May: ENGAGE partners meeting in Istanbul. The attendance of many EU national representatives will facilitate making connections to national ECE programmes
  • June: Lab Session, Collection of Final Case Studies
  • 19 June: CSR Europe General Assembly - presentation of LAB deliverables and progress
  • November: CSR Europe, ‘Alliance Assembly' - dissemination of the finalised deliverables

Milestones - 2007

  • April: LAB participants commit to using the roadmap to enhance their community programmes beyond current activity throughout the next 12 months and report back result for the final report.
  • 14 May: Initial LAB Session - laying the ground work
  • 19 April: CSR Europe Special Meeting on Laboratories
  • 19 July: Companies send initial results to CSR Europe
  • 29 November: CSR Europe Marketplace Event on Brussels - Initial Results of LABs Demonstrated