Why mandatory volunteering backfires on the wrong people

A leadership team decides that community involvement should not be optional. The argument is reasonable on its face. We already pay for the day, the participation rate is embarrassing, our competitors report better numbers, and once people try it they enjoy it. So we make it a requirement, or something one step short of a requirement, and the participation rate goes up the following quarter exactly as predicted.

The research says you have probably just spent down something you cannot easily rebuild, and that the number going up is the reason you will not notice.

The 1999 study, and what it actually found

Stukas, Snyder and Clary published a paper in Psychological Science called “The effects of ‘mandatory volunteerism’ on intentions to volunteer.” It studied students required to complete community service.

Two findings matter.

The first: stronger perceptions of external control eliminated an otherwise positive relationship between prior volunteer experience and future intentions to volunteer. Normally, having volunteered predicts volunteering again. When people felt controlled into it, that connection disappeared. The experience stopped building on itself.

The second is the one worth writing on a whiteboard. Students who did not expect to volunteer freely showed significantly lower future intentions after being required to serve than after choosing to. Not merely no better. Worse than if you had left them alone.

And then the finding that explains why this practice persists: those already inclined to volunteer were largely unaffected by the requirement.

This is why leaders who mandate it see no problem

Run those three results through an actual company.

Your enthusiastic third turns up, has a good time, and fills in the post-event survey with warm comments. They were going to volunteer anyway, and the mandate did them no harm. Your middle group turns up because attendance is expected, does the afternoon, and reports that it was fine, because it was. Your resistant group turns up because the alternative is being the person who did not, and quietly moves a notch further away from ever doing this voluntarily.

What lands on the executive dashboard is a participation rate that doubled and a satisfaction score in the eighties. Everything visible improved. The only thing that got worse is the disposition of the people who were the entire reason for the policy, and there is no report that shows it.

This is a general problem with measuring corporate volunteering, and it shows up elsewhere too. I have written about how a participation rate on its own quietly rewards the shallowest possible program. A mandate is another way of making that number move without making anything better.

The honest counter-argument

Someone in the room is now saying, fairly, that a company day of service is not coercion. Nobody is being threatened. The company is paying for the time, providing the transport, and organizing the work. If we can require people to attend an all-hands meeting or a safety training, why is a morning at the food bank different?

I think that objection is strong and it deserves a real answer rather than a dismissal.

The answer is that the value of volunteering, to the employee and to the receiving organization, depends on a state of mind that attendance cannot produce. An all-hands meeting delivers its content whether you wanted to be there or not. Safety training works on the compelled equally well. Volunteering is unusual in that the thing you are trying to create, a person who chooses this and goes on choosing it, is destroyed by the mechanism you would use to guarantee attendance.

Nichols, writing in Voluntas in 2013 on the psychological contract of volunteers, describes an expectation of relative freedom as central to what volunteering is to the person doing it. That is not sentiment. It is the reason NCVO’s 2023 survey of 7,006 UK adults found 26 percent of volunteers saying volunteering felt too much like paid work, up from 19 percent, alongside a fall in overall satisfaction. Volunteering that stops feeling chosen stops delivering what people came for.

There is also a straightforward version of the argument that has nothing to do with psychology. The nonprofit hosting you has to supervise whoever you send. A person who does not want to be there is more supervision for less output, and the charity absorbs that cost without any say in the matter.

Where a day of service turns into pressure

The line is rarely crossed by policy. It is crossed by defaults and by visibility.

Rodell, writing in Harvard Business Review in 2021, names three mistakes companies make with volunteer programs. One is blindly copying competitors. One is prioritizing leadership’s preferred causes over what employees actually care about. The third is pressuring participation, and in practice pressure almost never arrives as an instruction.

It arrives as a calendar invite you have to decline. As a team leaderboard. As the head of the department saying she expects to see everyone there. As a photo posted internally with names. As a line in a self-assessment form asking what you contributed to the community this year. None of those is a requirement. All of them are read as one by anyone with reason to be careful about how they are perceived.

I would add a fourth mechanism that is almost invisible from the top: making the volunteering day the only interesting thing on offer. If the alternative to the food bank is a normal Tuesday of email, and the alternative for the person who declines is watching their team come back with photographs, you have created pressure without writing a word of policy.

What voluntary has to mean in operational terms

Three tests. If your program passes all three, you can defend the word.

Opt-in, not opt-out. The default state is not attending. An employee who does nothing at all is not signed up. This single change is the difference between a request and an expectation, and it costs you participation rate, which is the point. A number produced by a default is not measuring willingness.

Attendance invisible to whoever writes the review. Not tracked in a system a line manager browses, not reported by team, not mentioned in one-to-ones. If participation is visible to someone with power over an employee’s pay, that employee is not choosing freely, whatever the policy says. This one is unpopular with communications teams because it removes the internal recognition photos, and it is the test I would hold hardest.

A real alternative use of the time. The person who declines takes an ordinary paid working day and loses nothing. If declining means forfeiting a benefit other people got, you have attached a price to saying no.

Nencini, Romaioli and Meneghini, studying 247 volunteers across four Italian nonprofits, found that organizational climate mediates the relationship between externally driven motivation and intentions to leave. Climate is the part you can actually manage. The three tests above are climate work, not paperwork.

What raises participation without a mandate

The Civic 50 honorees for 2026 average 45 percent employee volunteer participation against a US company average of about 25 percent, and 74 percent of them run formal volunteer ambassador programs. Peer recruitment, not instruction. That matches one of the four practices the Urban Institute associated with volunteer retention back in 2004: recruitment of volunteers by other volunteers.

Rodell and colleagues, writing in the Academy of Management Journal in 2017, found that corporate volunteering climate is predicted by company-provided resources and by employees’ belief in the cause, and that the two act as substitutes. A mandate is neither. It is a way of producing attendance without producing either resource or belief, which is why it does not compound.

The cheaper route is the one most companies have not tried properly: scheduled opportunities, manager approval taken out of the way, and causes chosen by employees rather than by the executive committee. Most programs with poor participation do not have a willingness problem. They have a logistics problem wearing a willingness problem’s clothes, and I have written about why the permission slip on its own does nothing.

What the evidence does not settle

The 1999 study was conducted with students, not employees, and a course requirement is not a line manager’s expectation. I would not claim the effect sizes carry over directly. Nobody, as far as I can find, has run the equivalent study inside a company, which is a real gap given how many organizations are making this decision.

I have spent my working life on both sides of it. Running paid teams, you have a lever: you can require things, and sometimes requiring things is exactly right. Coordinating volunteer work at scale, involving nearly ten thousand people across around eighty countries, that lever does not exist at all. You cannot make anyone come. What I took from the second experience is that the absence of the lever forces you to fix the things that were wrong anyway. Once compulsion is off the table, you have to make the work worth doing, and it turns out that most of the time the work was the problem. That is the same conclusion the retention evidence keeps arriving at from a different direction, which I have set out in what the role you give someone does to whether they come back.

If your participation rate is low, the mandate will fix the number and not the cause. The number was never the thing you wanted.