September 2007 Archives

Where lawyers show us the way

By Aaron Hurst on September 25, 2007 11:17 AM |

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While it's tempting to follow the cliche and point our fingers at lawyers as the root of our society's problems, there is one area in which the legal profession puts the business community to shame: pro bono service.

Lawyers have long recognized that it is a privilege to have the skills to practice their trade and with that privilege comes a responsibility to make those skills available to those who cannot afford them. The American Bar Association formally requests that all attorneys do 50 hours of pro bono service per year. It is not uncommon to have as much as 5 percent of a law firm's hours dedicated to pro bono causes.

A few other professions are starting to accept this privilege and responsibility and invest in pro bono service. Public Architecture, for example, recently published a report showing that a majority of architecture firms donate more than 2 percent of their time to pro bono work.

This is not the case, however, for firms representing other industries, such as marketing, information technology and human resources. Pro bono work in these industries tends to be ad hoc at best; most firms have no formal pro bono program or goals.

Inside large companies, volunteerism is still dominated by unsophisticated programs that treat employees as generic helpers rather than leveraging their professional talents to really make an impact in the community.

In a recent study of Bay Area nonprofits, 56 percent of nonprofit leaders cited a need for more skilled volunteers. Pro bono services can address some of the most basic infrastructure needs of nonprofit organizations, needs that are essential to running an effective organization, but of which nonprofits have long been deprived because they simply cannot afford them.

Nonprofits need pro bono marketing and design professionals to develop effective marketing materials. They need management consultants to help collect and analyze internal and external data. They need human resources managers to develop performance management systems. They need engineers to implement donor and program databases. They need interior designers to create productive work environments.

We need to help these organizations help our communities, and these are services we know business professionals are capable of providing.

There are a lot of excuses one can give for not doing pro bono work, but they are just that - excuses.

The most common excuse is that people simply don't have the time. It is true that business professionals are working more and more hours. This, however, is also true of lawyers. I know business professionals who work 60-plus hours a week and still make time for pro bono work and their families. I also know professionals who work 40 hours per week and yet say they are too busy. It is an issue of priority rather than an issue of time.

The second most common excuse is that business professionals don't know how to get involved since their companies don't provide pro bono opportunities.  This is an easy obstacle to overcome as there are many resources out there to help connect professionals with pro bono work, from VolunteerMatch to the Taproot Foundation to BoardNetUSA.

According to the 2000 Census, there are 3.1 million technology professionals, 1.4 million business planning professionals and 1.5 million marketing professionals working in the United States. If we could get even a small fraction of these professionals engaged, we could provide more than $1 billion worth of professional pro bono services to nonprofits every year. Imagine the magnified impact of thousands of nonprofits conducting outreach effectively and being able to focus on fulfilling their missions to improve our communities.

It is time that we set a higher standard for professions, companies and individual professionals. We need to follow the lead of the legal community and realize that it is a privilege to be a paid professional. We have an opportunity to express our appreciation for those who make sacrifices to enable our success by giving back our most valuable and scarce asset - our skills and talents.

Pro Bono in the Human Resources Profession

September 19, 2007 9:18 AM |

The Taproot Foundation is currently working to expand the Human Resources practice area, so I have been doing a lot of research on the subject.  In the course of my research, I have noticed that many of the industry leaders, the big hitters in HR, are not doing pro bono.  Compared to other categories of professional services firms, there is significantly less formal pro bono work in the HR field. This came as a big surprise to me because I would think that such a people-centric profession would be really into pro bono, and the philosophy of HR seems consistent with the tenets of the pro bono movement. 

 

In HR there is an emphasis on people as commodities and methods to best leverage the skills and talents of these commodities to help an organization reach its strategic goals.  In Pro Bono there, too, is an emphasis on people as valuable commodities, and it is by leveraging the skills and talents of people that pro bono improves society.  The end goal of HR may be narrower, but the thinking is similar.  It seems natural, therefore, to expect that many members of the HR profession would want to join the pro bono movement.  I can only continue to puzzle as to why the pro bono ethic is not a bigger part of the institution of HR. 

 

I wonder how HR professionals feel about this and whether they would like to see the firms they work for doing more pro bono.

Diversity and Learning and Development

By Aaron Hurst on September 11, 2007 8:50 AM |

wellpoint.jpgI recently interviewed David Casey, the Vice President of Diversity and Workplace Development at Wellpoint (a little known Fortune 50 company), about the potential for building the pro bono ethic in the HR profession.  In his work with women and people of color at Wellpoint he noted that one of the most common complaints is that their work in the community (boards, pro bono service, former jobs at nonprofits, etc) is not considered in their advancement and development within the corporations.

There is clearly an opportunity here to both increase the number of people doing pro bono work and address this challenge for women and people of color by lobbying to have companies make pro bono work and board service a formal and measured part of professional development programs.  Law firms have been doing this for years and have proven that it works.  Learning and development leaders should reach out to the legal profession and learn from their success to help advance the development of their teams and their communities, and to make their companies employers of choice for women and people of color.

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