Engagement cannot be mandated, but you can build a place for it
Reading time 3 minutes
Over the past few years I have heard dozens of corporate briefs that begin the same way: “We need our people to be more engaged.” What usually follows is a programme. A volunteering day. An internal campaign. A new value on the wall.
And it usually does not work the way anyone expected.
Engagement is not an activity you assign to someone. It is a decision they make themselves. A company can create the conditions for it, but it cannot make the decision on their behalf. That distinction is exactly the difference between a programme that runs and a programme people look forward to.
Why most programmes end up on paper
The classic sequence looks like this: leadership approves a budget, HR prepares an activity, communications sends an email. People sign up because there is an extra day off in it. The following year the same thing happens with lower attendance.
The mistake is not the activity. The mistake is the order. The company built the programme first and only then went looking for a reason anyone should care. Reverse it. Say clearly what you stand for as a company, then invite people to join, and attendance stops being the problem.
That sounds soft. The numbers say otherwise.
What the data shows
Benevity, the platform that processes corporate volunteering at scale, reported an employee participation rate of 10.8% for 2025. In 2020 it was 3.5%, so the trend is clearly upward, but a tenth of a company is still a tenth of a company. At the same time, 39% of the previous year’s volunteers do not return the following year. (The State of Corporate Volunteering, Benevity (https://benevity.com/research/the-state-of-corporate-volunteering-2026))
In other words: the average corporate programme struggles to keep people, not just to recruit them.
Which is why a number several times higher gets my attention. It came up very concretely in our podcast. Lucia Gröneová, who leads Swiss Re in Slovakia, described a ratio you rarely see in these programmes:
“Do you know how many volunteers we have, without anyone pushing, out of those 2,500 people? A thousand.”
Forty percent. With no pressure. That is not the result of a better-written email.
What usually sits behind a number like that
When I look at companies where something similar works, three things repeat and none of them is an activity.
The company says what it thinks, even when that is uncomfortable. Not about everything. But about the things that connect directly to why it exists. People do not need you to comment on everything. They need to know that you will sometimes comment at all.
The position is backed by money and time. A statement without a budget is marketing. A statement with a multi-year partnership is a position. You can tell them apart by what the company does in the year the topic becomes unpopular.
Engagement is open, not compulsory. The moment participation becomes a KPI, it stops measuring what it was meant to measure. You keep the number and lose the information.
Where the event comes in
This is where the topic meets my own trade. An event is not a tool for announcing engagement to people. It is a place where they can try it.
The difference is practical. A presentation about company values ends with applause. A situation in which someone does something together with someone else ends with a relationship. And the relationship is the only part that survives after the projector is switched off.
So when a client says they want “an event about our values”, my first question is a different one: what are people actually supposed to do after it. If we do not have an answer, we do not build an event. We build an announcement with catering.
Key considerations
If you are wondering why your programmes lack traction, try three questions:
- Can someone here say in one sentence what the company stands for?
- Has it ever cost us something? Money, time, or an uncomfortable phone call?
- Do people have anywhere to meet colleagues from outside their own department?
If the answers are yes, you will have engagement without a campaign. If they are no, no campaign will save it.
Engagement cannot be mandated. You can build a place for it and then let people decide for themselves.
Link to the podcast (in Slovak language)
Štefan Hric
Štefan is a Creative Pro Managing Partner in Slovakia and heads up the team in Košice.
“I believe events can change the world. For the better.”