Great business leaders learn quickly that the best business investments solve more than one problem.

Employer-supported voluntering is one of these investments. As a solution, it feeds many birds with one scone (or kills them, depending on your metaphor preference).

Take the first problem: we need to run corporate social responsibility programs that meaningfully give back to our communities and help us contribute to building a better world. But we need to do that within our business model - we still need to run profitable and effective companies!

And the second problem: we need to build an engaged workforce where people love working for the company, get along with their coworkers, and feel that they are making a positive difference in the world.

And there are nested problems within these two categories:

• Corporate social responsibility can take the form of big charitable donations, but that gets expensive quick, and there's never enough money for all the deserving causes. Plus, it's really hard to know what the best causes are - how do we identify and best support the causes that our customers, employees, and broader communities support?
• With employee engagement, how much can we afford to spend on team building? How do we ensure that all employees feel that the company supports causes that are meaningful to them? Our companies might have values, principles, and a mission statement, but how do we make that tangible for our employees? How can we measure impact and get the data to support spending money on something that doesn't deliver direct revenue?

So, there's a big Venn diagram emerging here, and right in the middle, taking up vast swaths of both circles, is employer-supported volunteering.

Who knew there was one answer for such a wide array of questions?

Employer-supported volunteering (ESV) is any program, formal or informal, that encourages a company’s staff to donate their time to community causes.

The volunteering that your employees do can take many forms, from pro-bono work, like a digital advertising agency helping a local nonprofit run its fundraising campaign, to big team building beach clean-up events, to individual activities undertaken by the employees, like mentoring through Big Sisters or helping out at kid's PAC events.

One beautiful thing about employer-supported volunteering is that it is a fantastic way to channel major resources into charitable causes. By rewarding and supporting employee volunteers, a company can give way more than it could afford to with a simple donation budget.

Plus, one sneaky fact is that the vast majority of volunteers end up donating to causes they give time to. So, by getting your employees out volunteering, you're inevitably channeling money to those causes as well!

This point is crucial - by supporting employees in volunteering, a company is growing deep roots in the community. Volunteers sign up for volunteer newsletters, attend volunteer appreciation events, develop friendships, and often end up on local nonprofit boards. Giving money will never give a company the community roots that a volunteer program can.

So you see, employer-supported volunteering is the best way to run an affordable, yet mighty, CSR program.

It's also, perhaps obviously, the best kind of team building. A big volunteer event is a great way to get to know your coworkers. Lots of nonprofits need many hands, foodbanks need packers & sorters, and organizations like the Surfrider Foundation are always running beach cleanups that are fun & rewarding and can handle limitless volunteers.

An important point that can't be overlooked is that employees are increasingly looking for meaning in their work. Many companies struggle to communicate how a person's work is making the world a better place, and this can lead to disengaged employees who are always on the lookout for a company that feels like a better values alignment.

By getting your employees to volunteer for the causes your company supports, you can give them a tangible taste of what your company's values are, and make them feel like invested participants in your corporate social responsibility.

Volunteering is by far the most tangible way for an employee to feel connected to a cause. By giving employees paid volunteer time off, you can show them that working for you means working for great causes. Plus, when an employee sees that their coworkers and corporate leadership volunteer their time, they see very tangibly that they work for and with the best kind of people.

Employer-supported volunteering is a fantastic tactic in any employee engagement strategy.

Feed two birds with one scone, kill another two with one stone. Whatever you want to do to the birds, now you know that employer-supported volunteering is the one thing you can do to solve two pressing problems.