How to Help Employees Find Purpose—When Everything Feels Broken

If you’re a CSR leader at a global company right now, you’re probably feeling two things at once:

• The personal weight of a world in crisis—from climate disasters to humanitarian emergencies to systemic inequities.
• The professional pressure to mobilize your workforce to do something about it.

The tension is real.

You want to launch meaningful programs, but you’re navigating budget scrutiny, legal caution, and employee burnout. You want to inspire your colleagues to act, but they, too, are overwhelmed. And it begs the question: How do you lead people toward purpose when they’re not sure where to begin?

Employees Are Ready—They Just Need a Clear First Step

Here’s what we know from the latest data:

• 95% of employees care about their employer’s community impact.
• 87% say volunteer opportunities influence their decision to stay.
• 91% report that participating in skills-based projects boosts morale, cross-team collaboration, and overall fulfillment.

The desire to help is not the problem. The challenge is choice overload and lack of clarity.

When people feel helpless, they don’t need a long list of opportunities—they need a simple onramp. Something close to home. Something they can say yes to.

And that’s where you come in.

Create a Framework for Action: Start Where They Are

We often say that to make a difference, you have to “start where you are.“

As a CSR leader, your opportunity is to help others do exactly that:

1. Start with existing passions. Encourage employees to volunteer for the causes they care most deeply about.
2. Encourage them to use their skills. There are so many causes, projects, and asks for time. Help your employees filter through the noise by presenting them guidance on how to use their skills.
3. Build “surround sound” support. Work through managers, executives, and company leaders to continue to promote the idea that volunteering is something your company absolutely encourages employees do do (here’s tips on how).
4. Champion action. Recognize your employees that take any step. Celebrate people that contribute, regardless of the size of their effort.
5. Connect them to community. Encourage employees to consider volunteering with the groups they’re already part of—their team at work, an ERG, a cohort from their last leadership experience, etc.

The right skills-based volunteering software can help, but you can also start small simply by hosting office hours, sharing guides with employees, or manually matching people when they reach out.

Why Skills-Based Volunteering Works Right Now

In a world full of uncertainty, skills-based volunteering (SBV) offers clarity. It’s:

• Relevant: Employees get to use the skills they’re proud of to support causes they care about.
• Strategic: Companies see benefits in retention, engagement, and leadership development.
• Impactful: Social enterprises and nonprofits gain access to expertise they can’t afford.
• Safe: It’s apolitical, scalable, and legally sound.

Just look at the numbers:

• 77% of companies reported an increase in employee volunteerism compared to the previous year—up from 61% seeing growth the year prior.
• Companies with SBV programs see 52% lower turnover among engaged employees.
• 90% of firms say SBV builds leadership and soft skills.
• 87% of nonprofits report better service delivery after SBV engagements.
• 80% of social innovators say they need more skilled support to scale.

When done well, skills-based volunteering becomes more than a feel-good initiative—it’s a flywheel that powers employee purpose, business strategy, and community impact.

Help Your Employees “Be the Change”

In our work with CSR leaders across sectors, we’ve seen one truth emerge over and over: Employees don’t need to be told what to care about. They need access and tools to act on what they already care about.

This means your role isn’t to have all the answers. It’s to design the system that makes it simple for employees to engage:

• Make it easier to get manager support to take time to volunteer.
• Spotlight people that mobilize their peers to engage in skills-based work.
• Offer toolkits for skills-based volunteering.
• Encourage people to overcome “imposter syndrome”.
• Create channels to help employees more easily find and match with skills-based volunteering projects.

The more you can shift your programs from “top-down participation” to “bottom-up empowerment,” the more sustainable they become.

Purpose Is a Practice, Not a Policy

We don’t have to solve everything right now. But we do have to move.

CSR leaders have a rare opportunity in this moment—to harness the energy, skills, and compassion that already exist inside their organizations and guide them toward action.

Start small. Start with community. Start where people already are.

And if you need help designing a skills-based volunteering program that meets this moment—MovingWorlds can help.

Because even in a complicated world, purpose is still possible. And it scales best when we build it together.

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AI disclaimer: Following our AI Ethics policy, we disclose when we use AI. This post was written with the help of an AI chatbot that we trained with our research, brand voice, and other rules. The content strategy was first written by MovingWorlds, inputted into AI with instructions to match our brand voice and readability, and then the post was proofread and finalized by a real human.