HUL's Sankalp journey a rousing success

SOCIAL ENTERPRISE

With a mission statement that says ‘add vitality to life’ and a corporate culture that believes in rendering service to community, Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL) started on an employee self actualisation journey that involved its 14,000 employees across 40 locations on completion of 75 years in October 2007.

A year later the company has exceeded what then looked like an ambitious target of contributing 27,375 hours or one hour per day of community service for the 75 years that the company has been in India.

The self actualisation process was introduced under the HUL sankalp programme, which was intended to help employees make a difference and was started in October 2007. HUL Sankalp is a platform for employees to register, track and get associated with a cause or an NGO.

The back-end support for HUL Sankalp was provided by IndianNGOs.com. On registering with the portal an employee gets transferred to ‘My page’ where an employee can choose to be associated with one of the 70 NGOs registered with HUL Sankalp besides keeping track of the number of hours they have volunteered/ completed in community service.

IndianNGOs also sends the employees an SMS and phone call as reminders to keep the appointment. The NGO is also responsible for cross checked the NGO’s authenticity and ensuring that the hours logged in by the employee in community service are successfully updated in his profile.

Leena Nair, human resources director, HUL, said: “We strongly believe that employees have an in-built desire to give back to the society. At HUL Sankalp, we provided employees a platform with multiple volunteering opportunities on various social issues. Many of these are in the cities within easy reach. We also encouraged employees to involve their families and thus started the self actualisation process.”

The programme has now gone beyond the cities to touch lives of people in the rural districts like that of Wad/ Jawahar. Here HUL Mumbai employees travelled 130 km to create awareness on hand wash and hygiene. Similarly, employees have also started involving their family members.

Nair added: “An employee, Crystelle Ellis along with her family clocked over 600 hours of voluntary service at the Little Sisters of the Poor, an old age home in Kolkata. Their activities included cooking, cleaning, serving, washing, helping the invalid to groom themselves and move about apart from helping with office work.”