Data Center Security

From increasing the diversity of our workforce and industry to reducing our environmental impacts to empowering our communities through philanthropic investments and volunteering, corporate responsibility (CR) touches every aspect of Symantec’s business. We’ve defined our strategy and are continually working towards our goals to operate as a responsible global citizen.

In addition to our dedicated global corporate responsibility team, every day Symantec employees across countries and business units collaborate to deliver on our mission of protecting our customers, our communities and our planet.

We are happy to feature a quarterly series – Inspired, United, Ignited: Symantec’s Corporate Responsibility Champions - that profiles stand out examples of our how our employees directly contribute to the implementation of our CR strategy. Some are leaders in our CR team, members of our Green Teams or champions for our employee resource groups, others are innovating to address needs in their function or region. All are inspiring others, uniting communities and igniting change to make Symantec a leading corporate citizen and to make our world a safer place.

I became a part of the Symantec family in 2006 when I joined the Human Resources team in Pune, India. I have spent the past eleven years in Human Resources and love the opportunity that my role provides to interact and engage with Symantec employees. I also have a passion for organizing, executing, and participating in community activities and therefore raised my hand when our Site-Executive was looking for a volunteer to coordinate corporate responsibility actions for the Pune office in 2007.

It has been a wonderful opportunity to connect with Symantec’s Corporate Responsibility (CR) team and to help our employees get involved with important social causes. Though CR is not part of my official role, due to my passion for this work, I lead our employee volunteering program in the Pune office, coordinating all of the logistics for our quarterly volunteer opportunities. In this last quarter, Symantec India employees volunteered their time with Seva-Sahayog helping prepare school-kits for children in need. I also help brand and market our CR programs among India leaders and employees, to help spread the word on all of the important work Symantec is doing in our local communities.

With the recent changes to the India Companies Act, it is now mandatory for all organizations with offices in India to spend 2% of their profits made in India on corporate responsibility related work. As such, I also partner with Symantec’s Legal, Finance, and Corporate Responsibility teams to help ensure we comply with that requirement.

In doing this work for ten years, I’ve found the two largest challenges to employee participation in our CR activities is making people aware of how to get involved, and overcoming the challenge of employees whose weekends are packed with personal and familial responsibilities. We know that finding time outside of work can be a challenge, and therefore in 2016 we focused on creating in-house volunteering activities, enabling employees to participate during their working hours. This solution lets employees know about upcoming CR opportunities through visual reminders in the office, thus helping them make a difference while keeping their weekends for themselves. This new program has generated a heartening and overwhelming response, and as a result Symantec India surpassed our Volunteering Hours target in 2016.

I am very proud to play a part in Symantec’s robust Corporate Responsibility program. My work in Pune is complemented and supported by the many people, processes and factors that contribute to our CR ecosystem. Symantec as an organization is committed to corporate responsibility, and therefore CR is embedded into our culture and work ethic. Due to the conducive environment created by this commitment, our corporate responsibility framework, and the numerous CR processes incorporated into our work, I feel empowered to not only leverage the existing system, but to take on new initiatives as and when we identify opportunities.  

As an example, we started an initiative for the India site to donate out-of-warranty but still useful IT hardware, including laptop and desktop computers. We work in partnership with Symantec India’s IT, Logistics, Facilities, and Accounts teams to get internal and external clearances to donate the used equipment to qualified charities. To date we’ve donated 750 computers to people in need and I hope to explore growing this initiative to more Symantec sites to further our reach and impact.

We have already begun to better collaborate with other Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), such as SWAN, and our local Green-Team, which have led to several ongoing CR programs. I look forward to continuing to work with these groups and the CR team to engage Symantec employees in corporate responsibility activities for many years to come.