The Companies at the Center of Change

Today, Points of Light, a nonprofit that inspires people around the world to dedicate themselves to community service, released their list of the most community-minded companies – The Civic 50 – and we are pleased to announce that Symantec has been honored for the fourth year in a row!

The Civic 50 is the only survey and ranking system that exclusively measures corporate involvement in communities. The survey sets the standard for corporate civic engagement nationwide and is a roadmap for companies seeking to best use their time, talent, and resources to improve the quality of life in communities where they do business.  The survey is administered by True Impact, a company specializing in helping organizations maximize and measure their social and business value.

The Civic 50 honorees are public and private companies with U.S. operations and revenues of $1 billion or more, and are selected based on four dimensions of their U.S. community engagement program including investment (employee time and skills, cash, in-kind giving and leadership), integration (into key business functions), institutionalization (organizational policies, systems and incentives) and impact (effective measurement). The Civic 50 companies are putting themselves at the center of change to create more enduring and sustainable business models.

Today we highlight some of the accomplishments that build our leadership in community engagement and discuss how we continually rethink our programs to maximize our impact:

• Last October during our second annual Global Service Week, over 1,500 employees volunteered across 11 countries donating more than 6,000 hours and over $41,000 – achieving a 57 percent increase from 2016 efforts. This fall, during Global Service Week we want to continue this momentum and are expanding efforts to target our remote employees that make up approximately 10 percent of our employee base. We will also help employees understand how our community investment focus areas – STEM education, diversity and inclusion, online safety and environmental responsibility – align to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, demonstrating that individual acts can collectively contribute to reaching a sustainable future.

• To further integrate our community engagement strategy with our core business, we refined our education focus area (that in FY18 represented 61% of our cash contributions) to prioritize cyber security and computer science education, rather than general STEM topics. This focus better aligns with our core competencies, enabling us to offer a broader array of resources – including our products and expertise – to partners. Additionally, we continue to evolve our product donation model, one of Symantec’s largest mechanisms for supporting the nonprofit community, to represent market shifts such as the transition from product hosting on desktops to the cloud.
   
• As a company is faced with shifting resources, maintaining employee engagement can be challenging. While our volunteer hours decreased by 10 percent to 2.24 hours per employee in FY17, in FY18 we redoubled our commitment to institutionalize community engagement through a portfolio of programs. These include the Take Five! Initiative (encouraging employees to give back at least five hours each year), Global Service Week (a week dedicated to service with organized activities and opportunities worldwide), and Symantec Service Time (granting 40 hours of paid time off each year). Additionally, through our site level grant program at our 20 largest sites we hold specific events to support selected charities and provide additional opportunities to give back. In FY18, our site level grant program had 100% participation from the 16 largest Symantec offices and we achieved an average of three volunteer hours per employee, putting us on a strong path to achieve our 2020 goal of an average of four volunteer hours per employee.
   
• Our senior leaders continued to invest their time and demonstrate that giving back is a core company value. For example, Mike Fey, President and COO, Symantec now serves on the board of NPower, a key nonprofit partner in our signature Symantec Cyber Career Connection (Symantec C3) initiative. Darren Thomson, EMEA CTO & Vice President, Technology Services sits on the board of nonprofit TeenTech to support organizational developments and continue expansion of Symantec’s mentoring partnership.  He serves as a highly engaged mentor encouraging female youth to consider careers in STEM and helping Symantec reach its goal to excite, engage, and educate one million students in STEM education by 2020.

Additionally, through our nonprofit board service program, Amy Cappellanti-Wolf, Symantec’s Chief Human Resource Officer, sits on the board of the Silicon Valley Children’s Fund (SVCF), a nonprofit committed to improving educational and life outcomes for foster youth.

• We continued to highlight stand out volunteers through our Volunteer of the Quarter award – profiling them on this blog, in social media and internally. Additionally, the Volunteer of the Quarter receives a $1,000 grant to his/her organization of choice.

Civic 50 honorees have found community engagement as a meaningful and valuable investment to inspire employee changemakers and create a strong culture of giving back. At Symantec, we are continually grateful for the individual employees, sites, and teams that make recognition like the Civic 50 possible.  

For the fourth year, we are honored to stand alongside companies that are putting themselves at the center of change to create more enduring and sustainable business models, and translating civic engagement into sound business practices.

To learn more about The Civic 50, see a full list of the winners and to access the highlights, trends, benchmarking data and best practices from the 2018 Civic 50, please visit www.Civic50.org.

See Symantec's full press release here.