UpTrajectory Review

Qing Gong's HBR piece makes a deceptively simple argument: when employees volunteer in crisis situations — disaster response, emergency shelters, mutual-aid efforts — they don't just do good in the world. They come back to work with sharper judgment under pressure, faster creative problem-solving, and a kind of resilience that no corporate training program can manufacture. The article's core claim is that high-stakes volunteer work functions as a genuine leadership and capability development engine, not merely a feel-good perk. For a small-business owner reading this, the framing matters enormously: this isn't about philanthropy as brand polish. It's about whether the chaos your people encounter outside the office makes them better at handling the chaos inside it.

Small businesses run on a thin bench. When one person freezes during a supply-chain rupture or a key-client blowup, there is no B-team to absorb the shock. Gong's argument lands differently for a 12-person company than for a Fortune 500: the skills crisis volunteers build — triage thinking, improvisation with scarce resources, emotional steadiness when the plan collapses — are precisely the skills a small operator needs from every seat. If a weekend spent coordinating flood relief teaches an office manager to prioritize ruthlessly and communicate clearly when everything is on fire, that is not a soft benefit. That is operational insurance you didn't have to pay a consultant to install.

What is genuinely useful here is the reframing of volunteer support from an HR checkbox into a talent strategy. Many owners quietly treat employee volunteering as a distraction — generous in spirit, but a scheduling headache. Gong pushes back on that instinct, and we think the push is warranted, with one caveat. The evidence that crisis volunteering builds transferable workplace skills is plausible and increasingly discussed in organizational research, but the article's available text is thin on hard data. We would want to see how these gains hold up across different personality types and roles before declaring it a universal prescription. Not every employee returns from a disaster zone energized; some return depleted.

The second-order effects cut both ways and deserve honest attention. On the positive side, employees who feel their employer supports meaningful external work tend to report higher engagement and loyalty — retention gold for a small shop that can't outbid larger competitors on salary. On the risk side, crisis volunteering can create burnout, scheduling conflicts during already stretched periods, and even liability questions if an employee is injured while volunteering in an official-seeming capacity. There is also an equity concern: if you build a culture that implicitly rewards employees who can afford to volunteer their weekends, you may be favoring those without caregiving obligations or second jobs. Designing support with that lens — paid volunteer time, flexible scheduling, no penalty for opting out — is the difference between a genuine strategy and a quiet bias amplifier.

The practical move is to start small and structured. Identify one or two employees already doing crisis or emergency-response volunteer work and ask them what support would actually help — paid hours, schedule flexibility, or simply acknowledgment. Then formalize a lightweight policy: a set number of paid volunteer hours per quarter, a clear opt-in structure, and a debrief conversation when someone returns from a deployment so the lessons they learned actually transfer to your operations. Watch whether the skills Gong describes show up in real situations: faster decision-making under pressure, calmer incident response, more creative workarounds when resources run short. If they do, you have found one of the cheapest capability-building investments available. If they don't, you have still done right by your people — and that, on its own, tends to compound.

“Real experience handling high-stakes challenges can help employees build resilience, agility, and creativity in the workplace.” — Harvard Business Review

Takeaway: Treat crisis-volunteer support as a structured capability investment — paid hours, flexible scheduling, and post-deployment debriefs — not a feel-good perk.