Encourage Your Team to Give Back

RCS Influencer Charles Antis says to teach your people that they have talent that is really valuable to others and can help those in need.  

Editor’s note: What follows is a transcript of a monthly interview RoofersCoffeeShop conducts with our RCS Influencers. In this episode, Charles shares why he encourages his team to give back and some of the programs they use to do it. You can read the transcript below or watch the video. 

Susan DeGrassi: 

Our topic this month is how do we encourage our employees to give back? So I'm going to start with just some programs that are easy to implement. We offer 16 hours of paid time off. We have a program called Double Your Donation, where we will match an employee's donation, a minimum of $25, a maximum of a thousand, a onetime gift to any nonprofit of their choice. And we also encourage volunteering and service. Between you and I and a couple of other employees, we serve on more than a dozen boards, multiple committees, and then we have all these amazing volunteer activities that we organize as a company. People can do their own thing. But if they want to join what we're doing, we're out there doing Habitat builds, Ronald McDonald House Meals of Love. We've done numerous walks for various causes. We invite our clients to these things, not just our employees. So lots of cool opportunities to really encourage the culture.

And Charles, before I even got here, you were starting this. You were developing. How did you do that? How did you find how to get started? 

Charles Antis: 

Well, I love all these things that we do today. It's hard for us to build them. We have to work together to build them. So I try to get to the spirit of what we're doing. And to know each other's stories, we have to know each other. We have to know and pause to recognize how great this talent is that we have. We have the ability to fix everything that leaks from rain. We get to keep families safe and dry. And when you pause on it, you realize that you really have something valuable to give. 

And so we know our stories. And one of the ways that we know them is we hand out 5013c giving cards. These are gift cards that can only be redeemed out of 5013c nonprofit. And many of you have received these from us, because we send them to all of our friends. 

And we love this because what this does is it tells us our stories. And even if you have people in your office that don't get along ... I like to pretend if we had somebody in accounting that no one liked, which we don't, and somebody in customer service didn't like her at all. But one day, she gets her giving card and she tells the group who she gave it to. And she says, "I gave it to Ronald McDonald House because I want to keep families close because my nephew was sick one day." And all of a sudden, whoa, it changes everything. That person in accounting is seen differently. That person in customer care that looks at her, she no longer judges her. In fact, she gets her. She gets why she is the way she is, because her real stories. Now we know her. And that's why we love to do this. 

We encourage our people to give. We encourage our people to give that talent, their doctor on an airplane talent. We know if there's a doctor on an airplane and if there's a medical emergency, we know that that doctor, he or she raises his or her hand in that moment and delivers that life saving emergency service. And how are you different? 

Many of you hear me talk about that first roof give 32 years ago, when I gave a free roof to the family of a little girl who slept on the moldy mattress. In that moment, I said yes. We said yes. And it's made a huge difference to all the volunteers that showed up that day, to every sibling that received that dry roof. That story's been told thousands of times. And it ends up filling us up in our culture and in our brand. 

So this is a really important topic. Thank you, Susan, for nailing it so well. The spirit of it is teach your people that everything that they do matters and that we exist to keep family safe and dry.

Charles Antis is the founder and CEO of Antis Roofing & Waterproofing. See his full bio here.