A CULTURE OF CARING
How a commitment to giving back has created one of the world’s most engaged teams
Stacey Ponich’s enthusiasm for giving back to his community is impressive by anyone’s standards.
This year, Ponich is on track to hit a remarkable 800 volunteer hours — up from 700 hours in 2017. Bringing clean water, electricity and medical aid to the poor in Ecuador; helping to engineer a nation-wide coffee cup recycling program; and teaching kids to be good digital citizens as a TELUS Wise Ambassador are just some of his favourite pastimes outside the office.
Volunteering an average of almost 2.5 hours every day — that’s on top of a busy full-time job as an Edmonton-based business consultant with TELUS’ data and trust office — there’s little free time in the calendar. But he wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I wouldn’t take all these commitments on if they weren’t important to me,” he says.
Ponich isn’t alone at TELUS. The same passion that energizes his volunteerism is core to the company’s culture and embraced widely across its 53,000 team members in Canada and around the globe. Since 2000, Ponich’s fellow team members and retirees have contributed over $525 million to local charitable and notfor-profit organizations and volunteered more than 8.7 million hours of service. Driven by a philosophy that has been in place for over a decade, “we give where we live,” the TELUS team volunteered a remarkable one million hours in communities across Canada in 2017 — uniquely differentiating itself from any other Canadian company.
“Our social purpose to create digital equality in our all-connected world is inextricably linked with our corporate strategy of unleashing the power of the internet. We also firmly believe that to do well as a business, we have to do good in the communities where we operate,” says Jill Schnarr, TELUS vicepresident of corporate citizenship and communications. “Giving back is ingrained in our culture, which attracts top talent to TELUS, and results in a passionate team that is both highly engaged and deeply committed to making positive societal change.”
That strategy is brought to life every year in TELUS Days of Giving, an annual volunteer movement that inspires thousands of TELUS team members to rally together to help create healthier, stronger and more sustainable communities across Canada and around the world. This year, more than 34,000 volunteers took part in more than 2,000 events, like shoreline cleanups, sorting food at food banks, reading to young students, donating blood, refurbishing shelters and planting trees.
It’s further exemplified by the company’s national campaign against cyberbullying, its TELUS Wise media literacy program for youth, and its Connecting For Good product portfolio to help low-income families, young adults and people with disabilities, among others, to connect to the internet at a significant discount.
As a globally recognized leader in corporate philanthropy (the company was named the most outstanding philanthropic corporation globally for 2010 by the Association of Fundraising Professionals), TELUS understands the impact that a powerful social purpose can have on a company’s culture and, in turn, the engagement and retention of a high-performing team.
Every year, the company uses Aon Hewitt, a global human resources consulting firm, to measure its employee engagement. Last year, an overall engagement score of 84 per cent placed it within the top 10 per cent of all employers globally.
Team member engagement is critical to the success of any company; a team of innovative and highly skilled workers helps maintain a competitive edge in a fastmoving digital era. Today’s young professionals, in particular, tend to seek out careers that offer rewards beyond a paycheque. The majority of millennials say it’s a priority for them to make the world a better place and will actively seek out a company that allows them to do that, according to research from Dalhousie University in Halifax.
TELUS understands this trend and it plays a significant role in the attraction and retention of a talented and highly engaged workforce.
“Working for a company with a strong social purpose is one of the top-three decision factors of potential team members,” says Sandy McIntosh, the organization’s executive vice-president, people and culture.
She notes that this sentiment is increasingly true for team members at all stages of their career, as well as for customers and suppliers. And the benefits of high engagement driven by a culture of giving back extend well beyond the organization.
“Every day, our team members are improving the lives of Canadians and the communities in which they live,” says McIntosh.
For Ponich, it’s that genuine sense of purpose that has kept him with the company for more than 20 years, and constantly inspires him to go above and beyond, day in and day out. And he doesn’t see that changing.
“I’m a lifer,” he says of his commitment. “I am just so proud of all the work TELUS is doing and I feel fortunate to be here.”