Why Mambu Matters?
When new colleagues join Mambu, we do a couple of interactive activities as part of onboarding. One of them includes an OECD test "How prosperous am I?". Most of our colleagues end up on the upper range of the prosperity spectrum. We recognise that this is not representative of the rest of the world and the unique privilege we have when it comes to income, stability, and security. If we ask how we got to where we are today, we owe it to hard work and persistence, but also to the better 'starting' positions we had in life: our families and our friends who supported us throughout the years, our communities and the public institutions that offered us education.
Contributing to society given our very fortunate and privileged position as a company and as individuals felt like the right thing to do but we wanted it to be shaped by our employees. Earlier this year we ran a social impact survey, together with Let's Creaid, and asked employees whether they would like to see a social impact programme in place. Half of Mambuvians - or every other person in the company - said they would. In fact, many of our colleagues already volunteer in their private time. This gave a start to Mambu Matters.
The basis of a successful social impact programme is the intersection of employees’ personal social themes and the ones they feel fit your organisation. That’s where the magic happens, that’s where your people get enthusiastic and active!
What is Mambu Matters?
We had three open questions after running the survey - how much time to volunteer do we want to grant, how to maximise impact to charities and social causes, and how to automate the donation and volunteering process. In the survey, Mambuvians have told us that they would appreciate anywhere from one to five paid leave days to volunteer. We agreed to two days, which is 1% of total working hours in a year.
Next, we debated the size of our social impact budget and arrived at a EUR 200 figure per employee per year. Our executive leadership team has been instrumental in advocating these benefits with the board and we have formalised them in our employee volunteering and donations policy.
Finally, we needed a platform to run our giving and volunteering activity. After some research, we settled on WeSpire, an employee engagement software that enables us to design and run social impact campaigns, and measure their impact.
We are thrilled to be supporting Mambu Matters, especially given the strong employee interest and leadership’s commitment to the program. These factors bode well for a transformational employee experience that embeds impact deeply into the Mambu culture.
Freedom, not control
One other important driver behind setting up Mambu Matters was to connect and provide a home for the many social impact activities sparking across Mambu constantly and offer clarity, formal benefits and resources to support these activities as well as inspire new action. Mambu Matters belongs to everyone at Mambu and anyone can drive activities and causes they are personally passionate about, or simply have the confidence that they can take time off to volunteer for private causes and that's okay. People managers play an important role here to create an environment where the team knows they can request time off and their manager and team will help them share the workload.
Just the beginning
Since the start of 2022, Mambuvians have already volunteered more than 300 hours for various causes. Over the years, we have directed more than €200K to charities that are working on some of the world's most pressing issues. With Mambu Matters, we hope to offer an engine to raise these numbers and empower Mambuvians to maximise their impact. If every one of us gives just a little back, consider what we can achieve together!