Does employee volunteering actually keep staff?

Twenty-eight percent against twelve percent. That single comparison is doing most of the work in most business cases for employee volunteering, and almost nobody who quotes it has read what sits underneath it.

It comes from Benevity, which ran an engagement study in 2018 across more than two million users of its platform at 118 companies. Turnover was 28 percent among employees who neither donated nor volunteered through the program. It was 18 percent among those who only donated, 17 percent among those who only volunteered, and 12 percent among the people who did both.

A second Benevity study, published in November 2022 and covering 10.6 million users at more than 400 companies, put numbers on the same idea by tenure. Employees with up to two and a half years of service who took part in corporate purpose programs had 52 percent lower turnover. For those with up to six years, the gap was 29 percent.

Those are large numbers. They are also weaker evidence than they look, and if you take them into a finance meeting without saying so, you will get taken apart by the first person who asks how the study was done.

What that data actually is

Both Benevity studies are correlational analyses of a software vendor’s own platform data.

Start with who is in the sample. Every person counted is an employee at a company that bought a giving and volunteering platform, which is already a company with money, an engagement strategy and a communications function. Then, within those companies, the comparison is between people who logged in and used it and people who did not.

That second split is the problem. Nobody was assigned to a group. Employees chose whether to participate, and the employee who signs up for the March food bank shift in her second month is not a random draw from the payroll. She is, on average, someone who already felt settled, who already liked her team, who already had a reason to think she would be around in the autumn. Engagement causes volunteering at least as easily as volunteering causes engagement, and this design cannot separate the two.

There is a milder version of the same objection that matters more in practice. Even if volunteering does help, the difference between 28 and 12 includes whatever share of the effect belongs to prior commitment. So the honest reading is that the true effect is somewhere below sixteen points and above zero, and nobody has published a study that can tell you where.

I still think it is worth citing. I just think you should cite it in one sentence with the caveat attached, rather than putting it on a slide in 60-point type.

Deloitte asked people what they would do, which is not what they do

The other figure in heavy circulation comes from Deloitte’s 2024 volunteerism survey, fielded in April 2024 with 1,000 US office professionals at companies with revenues above one billion dollars. Eighty-seven percent said they consider volunteer opportunities when deciding whether to stay at or join a company. Ninety-one percent said volunteering positively affects their work experience and their connection to their employer.

This is stated intent. It is people describing, on a survey, what they believe influences them. That is a genuinely useful thing to know about how a benefit is perceived, and it is not evidence about behavior.

The cleanest illustration of the gap sits in a different dataset. Points of Light’s 2026 Civic 50 honorees, all large US companies selected for their community engagement, offered volunteer time off at a rate of 74 percent. The median utilization rate of that time off was 19 percent. These are the companies that are best at this. Nearly nine in ten employees say volunteering factors into whether they stay, and four in five of the ones who are handed paid time to do it never take it.

Both things can be true. People can sincerely value a program and still not clear an afternoon for it. That gap is where the actual management problem lives.

The finding I would build on instead

The strongest study in this area is not about individual participation at all.

Rodell, Booth, Lynch and Zipay published work in the Academy of Management Journal in 2017 on what they call corporate volunteering climate: the shared sense within a company that volunteering is supported and valued. They found the climate is predicted both by what the company puts in and by how much employees believe in the cause, and that these two act as substitutes. Where the company provides little, employee belief carries it. Where belief is lukewarm, company resources can compensate.

The part that changes what you measure is this. A strong volunteering climate raised organizational commitment through collective pride, and it did so for volunteers and non-volunteers alike. The person who never signed up for anything still reported higher commitment when they worked somewhere the work was visibly happening.

That reframes the whole exercise. If commitment moves through pride in what the company does, then your participation rate is a poor headline metric. It counts the people who showed up and ignores the mechanism that reached everybody else. A program with 15 percent participation that everyone in the building has heard about may be outperforming a 30 percent program that lives quietly on an intranet page.

The enrollment gap is the part you can act on this quarter

Go back to the 2022 Benevity numbers and put two of them side by side.

The largest reduction in turnover appeared among employees with up to two and a half years of tenure. Participation was 6 percent among employees with less than a year of service, against 20 percent at two years or more.

The group with the most to gain is the group least likely to be enrolled. Even after you discount the effect size for self-selection, that ordering is hard to explain away, because the self-selection story predicts the same thing: new people have not yet formed the attachment that makes them sign up, which is precisely why the sign-up matters more for them.

Why does it happen? Nothing mysterious. Onboarding is already full. A new hire in month two is not going to be the first person to ask about taking a day out. The invitation usually travels through a channel they have not joined yet, sent by a colleague they have not met, about a partner organization they have never heard of. None of that is a policy failure. It is a routing failure, and routing is fixable.

Three changes are worth more than another all-staff email.

Put the first invitation inside the onboarding schedule. Not the policy, the invitation. A named date, a named person, a slot on the calendar in the first month.

Make the first one short and local. Benevity’s platform data shows average hours per volunteer falling from 16.4 to 12.7 a year, with roughly 60 percent of volunteers now giving fewer than five hours annually. Short exposure is what most people are doing anyway. As a first experience it is fine.

Have someone from the team go with them. The Deloitte respondents named building connections with colleagues among their top reasons for taking part, alongside a sense of purpose and improved morale. A new hire attending alone gets the least of that.

What this does to the nonprofit on the other end

One caution, because the incentives here are not symmetric.

Benevity’s State of Corporate Volunteering 2026 reports that only around 20 percent of nonprofit leaders say corporate volunteers contribute meaningfully to their long-term capacity. Corporate volunteer hours on the platform rose 175 percent between 2019 and 2025, while hours per volunteer fell. More people, doing less each, in shorter bursts.

If your retention case rests on employees feeling proud of the work, the work has to be worth being proud of, and forty people painting a fence that did not need painting does not get you there. The same logic that governs what the role you give someone does to retention applies to your employees on a day of service. Ask the partner organization what they actually need in November, not what makes a good photograph in June.

What I would want measured

I have spent my working life running in two directions at once: high-performing teams of paid staff on one side, and large organizations where the majority of the work was completed by volunteers on the other. The thing that transfers between them is unglamorous. People stay where they can see the effect of their own effort, and they stay where somebody noticed.

So if you are building a case, measure three things and stop pretending you can measure the fourth. Measure participation by tenure band, because that is where the gap is. Measure utilization of volunteer time off, because it is the honest test of whether the benefit is real. Measure whether people can name what the company did last quarter, because that is the closest practical proxy for the climate finding.

The fourth thing, a clean causal estimate of what volunteering does to your turnover, is not available to you and is not available to anybody else either. Say that out loud in the meeting. It costs you very little and it makes the rest of your numbers worth believing. If you want the same treatment applied to the dollar value of volunteer hours, the arithmetic and its limits are here.