How volunteering boosts employee morale and productivity

Fortune

A recent large-scale systematic review, in fact, found that a range of workplace wellness offerings had no positive effect on employees’ well-being. But there was one clear exception: volunteering.

“My study analyzed data from about 50,000 employees over 250 companies in the U.K. Volunteering was the only one of these interventions which showed…improved well-being,” says study author William Fleming, a sociologist and research fellow at the University of Oxford. “It instills a bit more social meaning…into people’s jobs, especially if you’re working for a big corporate global organization [where] it can feel like you’re just making money for the man and spinning paper sheets around.”