There is a before and an after. Joining the ranks as a corporate volunteer takes its toll. And transform. Most of the time, silently. The person wins and elevates the professional. From promoting the employability of migrants, prisoners or people with disabilities, to collaborating in humanitarian emergencies or accompanying lonely elderly people. Hundreds of causes that mobilize thousands of employees, middle managers or managers, without hierarchies. Initiatives that bring to light skills and abilities, even unknown to themselves, and that they incorporate into their daily life in the office or workplace. “Volunteering trains the spirit of self-improvement, strengthens the team relationship and changes the way we look at our colleagues,” says Cristina Llanas, Volunteer delegate at CaixaBank. “Empathy skyrockets and you become more decisive,” adds Llanas, for whom dedicating herself to others and facing harsh realities has taught her to relativize. “When something goes wrong at work there is always a solution; you develop your creativity and think differently.” The financial institution has the El Tree of Dreams program, a solidarity initiative in which it participates with the Three Wise Men to distribute 34,000 gifts to children at risk of social exclusion. A program that this year incorporates the elders who have also written their letter for those of the East. “We have delivered more than 1,000 gifts to residences,” says Jordi Pastó, director of Social Impact and Volunteering at CaixaBank. The manager encourages the staff of all organizations to “collaborate in solidarity actions” as his 19,000 volunteers already do, who have participated in more than 60,000 actions carried out with some of the 1,300 social entities with which the financial entity collaborates. One of them is the engineer Marc Muntañá, director of Cybersecurity Risk, Fraud, Outsourcing and Reputation at CaixaBank, who expresses the skills that volunteering brings him. «You acquire greater mental flexibility, since it requires you to build in minutes the type of interaction that you are going to develop with a disparate and unknown team. You learn to detect, on the fly, the abilities of each one to achieve the success of that volunteering and you train problem-solving skills to resolve all types of inconvenient situations that arise.»
change tool
Jordi Pastó insists: “What begins with a gesture of solidarity ends up transforming the internal culture and its professionals.” This is also reflected in the study Development of Competencies and Skills through Corporate Volunteering, by Voluntare, which identifies skills such as: capacity for sacrifice, leadership, negotiation, long-term vision, responsibility, knowing how to stay calm in complex situations or flexibility. “Volunteering is a very powerful tool to develop a specific professional profile based on the competency map of each company,” says Juan Ángel Poyatos, founder of Voluntare. And set a deadline for it. “At least 20 hours of experience (one afternoon a week for two months) in complex and extremely vulnerable projects is necessary to acquire these skills,” he adds. Another study based on the Ulysses Experience, a volunteer program developed by the consulting firm PWC, concludes that being in contact with situations related to poverty profoundly transforms the management style of leaders. The Adecco Foundation’s Vulnerability and Employment Observatory also states that being a volunteer affects the development of greater sensitivity and connection with social reality (69%) as well as an increase in the sense of purpose and self-esteem (64%). In the words of its manager, Pablo García, «volunteering completely transforms teams. It prepares them to break barriers and be able to work with diverse, vulnerable and disabled people about whom, due to lack of knowledge, stereotypes, prejudices and even arouse a certain fear tend to weigh on them.»
Impact
From Repsol, volunteer Ángel García, operator of the control room at the Tarragona industrial complex, describes the impact of collaborating on these programs as “brutal”. “A shake of values occurs in you” with which he claims to extract lessons “that have given me a radical change of mentality in my work approach.” And he summarizes them: «Getting involved in such harsh, different and distant realities to contribute to their improvement makes you see that everything is possible. And you achieve this by forming a strong team with the same objective. You also learn to take perspective for the best resolution of complex situations and completely rule out settling into complaints when things don’t work out. You develop greater creativity in the search for solutions; you learn to truly listen and make yourself understood. And, without realizing it, you have developed natural leadership.» Taking a step forward in your communication style is the improvement reported by Rocío Bustamante, manager of international connectivity services and platforms at Telefónica Global Solutions. «Volunteering has made me evolve towards a more inclusive communication style. When you leave your comfort zone you realize that many people do not understand technology and it is your responsibility to do so and manage with it in a hyperconnected world.» Contributing to the reduction of this digital divide is “especially important for the most vulnerable youth to bring them closer to the world of work through technology.” For technical profiles like yours, participating in volunteer actions represents a push “at the networking level because you meet colleagues with whom you will carry out transversal projects, and the training of this communication represents an advance to address 360º products where the perspectives of others are understood without having rotated,” he concludes. 97% of organizations offer volunteering activities during working hours, according to the Voluntare 2025 Report, an international reference network for corporate volunteering. The study estimates the participation of managers in volunteer programs at 61%. Collaborating in solidarity action offers 62.5% of volunteers leadership opportunities within the framework of their programs as well as skills development (97%), motivation (97.7%) and promotes the organization’s relationships and commitment to the community (98.4%).
