VSO: Sharing skills, changing lives

VSO Business Associates enables companies to combine employee secondments overseas with Corporate Social Responsibility objectives. Employees spend up to two years volunteering in a developing country, sharing skills where they’re needed most.

Global consulting firm Accenture have been a VSO Business Partner since that programme was established in 1999. VSO Business Partners offer volunteering to their employees, as well as financially supporting a tailored programme of project funding.  In 2005, Accenture employee Alefiya Rajkotwala spent nine memorable months in Rwanda through the partnership. Her experiences there clearly demonstrate how VSO volunteering can greatly benefit the individual, the organisation they volunteer with and the company they work for back in the UK.

The professional benefits of volunteering

Alefiya is in no doubt that the year she spent volunteering with VSO in Rwanda has had a significant impact on her work back at Accenture.

‘Volunteering has definitely enhanced my relationships with my clients,’ she says. ‘As soon as they find out I’ve done VSO, they see me as a person - an individual who has gone and done something different. Clients love hearing my stories. I’d say volunteering has been great for client relationship building.’

Alefiya’s relationship with her team has improved too. Like her clients, they look at her differently when they find out she has volunteered. ‘Doing VSO has made me a more credible leader,’ she explains. ‘It has also improved my consultancy soft skills like diplomacy, negotiation and patience.’

Embarking on a new challenge

After eight and a half years at Accenture, Alefiya wanted to try something different. ‘VSO appealed to me because it meant I could live in a developing country, be part of a community, be as local as you could be, and give something back.’

Accenture’s partnership with VSO meant that Alefiya could volunteer safe in the knowledge that she had a job to return to. So in January 2005 she swapped London for Kigali, Rwanda’s capital and her home for the next nine months. Here she was employed by the Secrétariat National de l’Enseignment Catholique (SNEC), Rwanda’s central Catholic body of education.

Sharing skills in a new setting

Drawing on her extensive management skills, Alefiya developed the confidence of her colleagues at SNEC by running workshops in effective team working, clear communication and SWOT analyses. The latter got participants discussing their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. ‘The session got them acknowledging that everybody has their weaknesses, and you should focus your strengths on maximising opportunities,’ explains Alefiya. ‘It was quite basic compared to what I normally do at Accenture, but I wanted to get my colleagues thinking differently about the way they approach their work.’

Alefiya’s technical expertise came in handy too. As well as challenging gender stereotypes – ‘the fact that I was a girl and had an engineering background was fascinating for people’ – it enabled her and a fellow volunteer to set up an email system at SNEC. ‘There hadn’t been a culture of written communication in the office, but now colleagues could email each other. They had never done this before,’ says Alefiya. ‘It was great to see their confidence with IT by the time I left. We’re still in email contact now.’

Recommendations and reflections

Alefiya describes doing VSO as one of the most enriching and memorable experiences she will ever have. So it’s unsurprising that she recommends volunteering to others. ‘When I got back I told my colleagues that I think it should be made mandatory!’ she says. ‘Working at Accenture, you tend to be in a bubble with your own way of doing things – and you think that way is the right way. It was very humbling to learn that there’s a hundred ways of doing things in different situations. VSO is a great opportunity to get that new perspective – it’s fantastic, and I’d recommend everybody do it!’

Impact

• Volunteering has enhanced Alefiya’s relationships with both her colleagues and her clients.
• Alefiya believes she’s a more credible leader as a result of volunteering.
• As well as developing her Rwandan colleagues’ team working skills, Alefiya introduced them to email communication by setting up an email system in the office.