CELPIP Listening Part 6 Practice Test: Paid Time to Volunteer

NARRATOR: Volunteering has long been regarded as a private virtue, something Canadians squeeze into evenings and weekends between work and family obligations. Increasingly, though, employers are being asked to make room for it on company time. A growing number of firms now offer what is known as volunteer leave: typically one to three paid days a year that staff can spend at a food bank, a literacy program or a local shelter. Advocates call it a modest investment with outsized returns; sceptics wonder whether generosity can, or should, be scheduled by the human resources department.

NARRATOR: Dana Whitfield, who oversees personnel at a Winnipeg insurance company, introduced two volunteer days four years ago and has little patience for the sceptics. Her staff, she notes, are not short of goodwill but of time, and charities report that weekday help is precisely what they lack most. Whitfield also points to less obvious benefits. Employees who coach youth teams or sit on non-profit boards, she argues, return with leadership skills that no workshop could replicate. And in a competitive hiring market, the policy has become an unexpected recruiting asset; applicants routinely ask about it in interviews, and a few have told her it was the reason they said yes.

NARRATOR: Martin Kovacs, who runs a twenty-person machine shop outside Hamilton, sees things differently. He doesn't object to volunteering, and he volunteers himself, but he maintains that what a large insurer absorbs without noticing can cripple a small operation. A shop his size, he says, has no one to spare. When one of his machinists is away, an entire production line can sit idle. Kovacs is also unconvinced that the policy changes much. In his experience, the people who use such days are those who already volunteer, so companies end up subsidizing generosity that would have happened anyway. And he wonders whether a good deed performed on the company's dime carries quite the same meaning.

NARRATOR: Whitfield concedes that participation was dismal at first, barely one employee in ten. It climbed only after senior managers began taking the days themselves and talking openly about where they had spent them. Kovacs, for his part, has floated a compromise: letting staff trade a statutory holiday for a volunteer day, an arrangement that costs his business nothing and that his staff, so far, seem to like. Still, whether volunteer leave becomes a workplace standard may depend less on the arguments than on who can afford to make them.