As reports about the devastating cyclone in Myanmar reached Canadian households last week, the e-mails in Gavin Thompson's inbox started piling up.
The messages all echoed a similar tone: How are we getting involved? What are we doing? "They'll start asking for time off to go to Myanmar pretty soon," said Mr. Thompson. "We see this all the time with disasters of this scale."
Mr. Thompson doesn't work for a charity or an NGO. He's the director of community affairs at Microsoft Canada, one of dozens of Canadian firms that have begun offering employees paid leave to volunteer in troubled regions around the world. And that's above and beyond their vacation time.
Not long ago, the sum of a corporation's generosity was scribbled out on cheques the size of hockey nets and presented by beaming CEOs before cocktail crowds.
Paul Patinios, a Microsoft employee, took advantage of his employer's corporate volunteering policy by working at an elephant rescue centre in Thailand last year.
But in the past five years, corporate giving in Canada has undergone a sea change.
Today, companies are paying workers while they scoop elephant dung in Thailand or renovate inner-city playgrounds.
"Champagne giving is just not the way to go any more," says Wendy Mitchell, manager of corporate citizenship at Volunteer Canada, which helps companies set up volunteering policies. "Employees want to get involved. They don't just want to see that old-style cheque-writing any more."
And in a country tapped for skilled labour, what the worker wants the worker gets.
Several years ago, Microsoft Canada asked employees how it should spend its charitable donations.
"The employees came back to us and resoundingly said, 'Give us time off to volunteer,' " Mr. Thompson said.
In 2002, the company launched a program that grants every worker 40 paid hours a year to volunteer wherever they want.
"This is the best benefit I've ever received at any company," says Paul Patinios, a marketing manager for Microsoft's Xbox game console, who spent his 40 hours at an elephant rescue centre in Thailand last year.
For a week, he shovelled poop, chopped watermelons and cleaned pachyderms on Microsoft's dime. "Some corporate volunteer events are more like teambuilding exercises. You're still working in a team, and you're probably wearing a company T-shirt. With this, they left me alone and let me work on my own terms."
About one in five of Microsoft Canada's 1,000 workers have used the volunteer leave, according to Mr. Thompson.
When the deadly tsunami swept across much of South Asia in 2004, "we had employees here who were out ahead of the relief organizations. They're very nimble."
The upsides are clear. Volunteer work engenders a certain pride and esprit de corps among workers, which has obvious benefits for companies.
"As soon as I tell someone about this, they ask if Microsoft is hiring," says Mr. Patinios.
Scores of companies have followed Microsoft's lead. Roughly 55 per cent of Canadian companies now offer some kind of paid leave for volunteering, according to Volunteer Canada, a non-profit that links companies with charitable opportunities. Much of the stimulus has come from the Corporate Council on Volunteering, a group of 25 companies - Home Depot, IBM, KPMG and Molson among them - that work through Volunteer Canada to promote corporate volunteering programs.
Business software giant SAP Canada jumped on the bandwagon two years ago, when more than half the company's Toronto employees refurbished a run-down public school on company time. This year, SAP employees helped build the school a playground.
"In hindsight, we've been wondering why we didn't think of this earlier," says Emile Lee, corporate communications manager at SAP.
The idea of paying volunteers might seem contradictory and even detrimental to the spirit of giving, but Mr. Lee has found otherwise.
"For many of these employees, it's the first time they've volunteered for anything, but they're quickly sold on it. A lot of them now volunteer on their own time."
For Chuck Ormrod, a partner at KPMG, a recent volunteering sojourn to Kenya would have been impossible without his company's support.
While he didn't get any paid leave, he and several other KPMG workers set up a computer lab in a small village with retired company laptops.
"The community benefits and you get an ease of conscience that allows you to do more in your day-to-day activities," says Mr. Ormrod. "It's a win-win-win situation."
As for the recent humanitarian disaster in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, volunteers are waiting to see if the country's military junta will grant them visas before they take their leaves.
"Everybody is just on hold at the moment," says Mr. Thompson. "But they're at the gates and ready to go."
