GIVE TO CHARITY ... OR ELSE

Ever since his manager announced that every employee "will donate to the company's charitable foundation, period," my reader from the Southeast has worried that he'll be fired for not contributing.

"I absolutely hate being told that I must give," he writes.

He resents the expectation that he should give any of his hourly wage to a cause deemed appropriate by his bosses. What's more, some of the past recipients of funds from the foundation are groups whose causes my reader opposes.

The problem my reader faces is one regularly faced by many employees: How do you respond to a companywide edict to give to a specific charity, if you choose not to participate, without appearing to be uncharitable and/or risking your job?

Ever since the announcement, my reader has been Googling to see if he can find instances of people being fired for not contributing to a charitable drive. He hasn't. Nor have I heard of any. I've heard from readers who have been assigned to head annual charity drives and had the results reflected in their annual performance reviews, but to date I've never heard from anyone who claims to have been fired for not giving to a company-supported charity.

Don't get me wrong. I believe that company support for charitable efforts is admirable. An annual company effort to raise money or food is a smart way of gathering resources from people willing to give where they congregate most -- in the workplace. Teams of workers who band together to work with groups such as Habitat for Humanity to help construct much-needed low-cost housing in a community should be applauded.

But companywide efforts should not have the glint of coercion. For a boss to stand in front of his employees and demand 100-percent participation in giving to a charitable fund is wrong, regardless of whether that fund goes against their personal beliefs. That wrong-headedness may well drive away even those employees who would have been willing to contribute had the effort been presented as voluntary.

Too often a manager is driven to such behavior because he or she has been put in charge of running that year's charitable drive with some participation incentive attached. Such an arrangement may be well-intended, but may unintentionally result in the type of behavior my reader witnessed.

Better to avoid giving incentives to individuals running such programs, and better yet to assign some central department -- human resources, for example -- to organize the companywide effort. This will avoid giving employees any sense that their job security rests on whether they contribute and/or whether they get others to contribute.

The right thing for companies to do is to choose a charity or a group of charities that they want to help, but to give employees the opportunity to decide whether they would like to participate. If none of the charities the company chooses matches up with those that a given employee prefers to help, then that employee should feel absolutely no guilt or fear about saying no. They can contribute to their own causes on their own time.