For employers under pressure to deliver on ESG, retention and wellbeing, volunteering could be the missing link. Sanjay Lobo, founder of OnHand, says making opportunities easy to access and shrinking the effort required can turn a neglected perk into measurable gains in engagement, skills and purpose.
Sanjay Lobo didn’t set out to build a corporate volunteering platform. “I was a lawyer, so that’s how I started my career,” he says, recalling stints inside high-growth tech. What kept pulling him off the legal track was an itch to “deliver some good”.
At Vistaprint, a chance 90-minute call with a small charity ordering T-shirts for the first marathon in Sierra Leone flipped a mental switch. “All they wanted was a tiny discount.” He found himself asking a bigger question: how do you make it easy, inevitable, even, for businesses to do more than the bare minimum for their communities?
That impulse eventually became OnHand, a UK app that enables employees to take part in social and environmental volunteering projects. “Corporate, specifically, wasn’t the idea. The idea was, let’s go and help the old, the social care crisis, by matching up a local person with an elderly person near to them.”
A personal need, helping his dad with shopping, made the model feel both urgent and obvious. Then Covid arrived and changed everything.
“When Covid hit, corporate employers started coming to us, and that was the light bulb moment of, if the corporates are happy to pay for this, there’s a beautiful virtuous circle where employees get to access volunteering really easily. People we help get the service completely for free. Corporates get great stats to talk about in terms of ESG and impact reports.”
The premise is simple: corporate volunteering only scales when you strip out friction. In most organisations, Lobo argues, a volunteering policy exists but languishes. “No one has time, everyone’s time poor. And this stuff’s really hard to source,” he says. The result? “There’s hundreds of millions of hours of paid volunteering time that goes unused every year.”
Lobo says the fix is equal parts plumbing and culture: make opportunities easy to find and simple to do, then make them visible.
He is evangelical about shrinking the unit of effort. “If you can get your team into the habit of just doing an act of good once a week, or whatever, and measuring that, that leads to what you see as normal volunteering,” he says. Recognising micro volunteering is probably the thing that will move the needle, he adds. Data backs the habit-forming effect, he says: “Nine out of 10 people come back, and they do more activities.”
The key to boosting the visibility of volunteering is to encourage leadership-led storytelling. Lobo urges managers and senior executives to get involved with doing volunteering and then to be very vocal about it. For example, taking videos and photos, and sharing that a lot. “It legitimises it for the rest of the organisation.”
Make a point of baking in the expectation of volunteering opportunities from day one, he says, to avoid it being a “dusty forgotten about benefit”.
“One client even sets the tone pre-hire. They put OnHand in their job descriptions… When you’re hired, it’s then part of the induction process you go through.”
Impact assessment
The impact of volunteering is not soft or marginal, Lobo insists, saying that it’s one of the few wellbeing levers with proven outcomes. He notes a study by Oxford University’s Wellbeing Research Centre, which found that a range of workplace wellness offerings had no positive effect on employee wellbeing, with one clear exception: volunteering.
He says this matters in a labour market where engagement is fragile and pay has lagged in real terms. “How do you break that? I think it’s got to be purpose,” he says. “For Gen Z in particular, the old deal of ‘work hard get rewarded’ doesn’t work anymore.”
And not every act of volunteering requires time out of the office. One of Lobo’s favourite examples is a make-and-send session called ‘cards for bravery’ for children in hospital. It was scheduled from 3-5pm before after-work drinks, and it quietly stole the show.
“At 5.30pm they were still making cards. At six o’clock, they were all comparing cards, like who’d made the nicest one, and taking photos. I was just amazed.”
Engagement spike
When teams bring their core skills to bear, the engagement spike is dramatic, Lobo says. He cites management consultant Baringa’s pro-bono projects, which include providing sustainability strategy for a homelessness charity’s property portfolio and advising a youth organisation overwhelmed by 20,000 applications.
He says that for consultants that are used to billing by the hour, being trusted to lead these missions is galvanising. “What that does for engagement is off the charts.”
Lobo’s goal is not to bolt a noble pastime onto a busy workweek, it’s to rewire an underused benefit into a flywheel that feeds wellbeing, skills, retention and reputation. The corporate need, in the end, is refreshingly clear, he says: remove the friction, shrink the commitment, show the stories, and set employee expectations from day one. As Lobo puts it, there’s “something bigger here. It’s not just this nice thing. It’s really material on engagement and productivity”.
Lobo acknowledges that charities’ time is scarce, and that their expectations are evolving. “When we started five years ago, it was not that common for charities to charge for corporate days. Now it’s becoming much more normal. And it should be something charities charge for, it’s a revenue stream.”
Corporate funding unlocks access and predictability, while platforms, like OnHand, can reduce the back-and-forth that kills momentum.
Insider view
So what does a high-impact scheme look like on the inside? Lobo says start by changing the granularity of the policy. “Most organisations have a policy, and usually it’s two or three days off a year paid. Some people do it in hours, and hours is probably better,” he says.
Measure small acts, celebrate them loudly, and make it the social norm to join in. That cultural nudge is amplified when volunteering replaces outdated team rituals such as “boozy socials”. He sees a growing trend for activities, such as giving back to your community, becoming a bigger part of the workplace team social.
Volunteering has a role in balancing the rise of AI too. As AI automates more entry-level work and saturates the workplace with synthetic interactions, he sees an unexpected dividend. “Human connection at some point becomes so much more important. And how do you get that? Well, it’s probably bringing teams together for something like a group volunteering exercise.”
Looking ahead, Lobo argues we’re “at the start of a trend on responsible businesses”, which has become more visible in the rise of BCorp and the proliferation of impact reports. OnHand’s role is pragmatic, he says, as it helps businesses with the gap between volunteering benefits and access to charity opportunities.
