My experience at the SAP Social Sabbatical 2016
SAP Social Sabbatical is one of SAP’s award winning Corporate Social Responsibility programs in which around 120 colleagues from all over the global SAP ecosystem get the golden chance to make a change in people’s lives with their professional experience. The chosen employees get the opportunity to put their regular jobs (and lives) on hold and provide pro bono consulting to handpicked non-governmental organizations in different developing countries for a period of 4 weeks.
How I came to know about it and the application process…
I knew nothing about this program when I first saw the mails inviting applications for it. I read many blogs written by previous participants and I was thrilled to apply for it. I talked to my manager, who was extremely supportive of my participation and I decided to go through the application process. There were questions that needed to be answered as part of the application to justify my motivation on joining this program, which was followed by some interviews. I was fortunate to be chosen for this program this year and was assigned to the team of 12 that would work with NGOs in Greece in October 2016.
PYXERA Global is the organization that helps SAP run this program and they are responsible for all the selection, pre work and logistic activities for the program.
Plethora of emotions on being the youngest participant…
Our pre work calls started in August 2016 and I was introduced to our team of 12 that would be working together in Greece for a month. We were split into four sub teams that would work with 4 different NGOs in Greece. During the initial calls, I realized that I was the youngest participant in the team and this fact intimidated and excited me at the same time.
Once we landed in Athens, Greece, my pressure levels pumped up. I was nervous to meet my team members, some of them so much more experienced than me. Truly speaking, I was very sure about how enriching this experience would be for me but was extremely skeptic on what I had with me to offer back to the team and to the organization I would be working with.
The initial anxiety subsided when I met my lovely team members, the cordial PYXERA hosts and our very own alumni mentor, Irina Pashina. Irina was part of the Social Sabbatical in Chennai in April 2016. She was very supportive throughout our engagement and her smile always made my day. We had a one day workshop with the entire team to get ourselves acquainted with each other and we all gelled up pretty early into the first week.
We started our work with our client organizations and the first week really tested our capabilities of listening, listening to understand rather than listening to respond.
Our client organization — Action Finance Initiative (AFI)
I was part of the team that worked with Action Finance Initiative (AFI), a not-for-profit organization and the only one in Greece, that provides small loans, business training and ongoing mentoring support to social entrepreneurs across Greece. People who have a business idea or project, but are not able to find access to the necessary funds, can work with AFI to secure a loan of up to 10,000 euros.
AFI is a very small team of 3 people but with the current economic condition in Greece, they have a very promising market in their region of operation. Keeping the loan factor aside, the business development services and the mentoring support they provide to the clients is of great value to them as it helps their businesses to excel ensuring a steady income.
Current situation at AFI…
AFI does all the screening activities for a client and prepares his or her case to be presented before a bank that disburses the loan. The operational activities for a microloan organization are understandably very complicated and time consuming and it becomes a bigger challenge with a smaller team like AFI. Even though the micro credit development officers who worked with the clients knew their tasks, there was no business process in place and it would be very difficult to cater to a larger client base with ad hoc activities. In our initial meetings with the AFI team members and the stakeholders, we realized that the overall awareness of micro finance in Greece was very low. Even though there were many success stories of those who made it big with the microloans they received, AFI still had a lot to do to reach out to a wider audience. AFI had to work on devising their marketing and communications strategy in order to project their brand and to secure more clients.
Scope of our work with them and how we went about it…
With all the information and experiences in our initial interactions with the AFI team, we realized that the two main aspects where AFI needed our help were business operations optimization and their marketing and communications strategy. AFI had to work on these pillars to ensure that they secured more clients with a higher brand recognition and that their operations were simplified enough to handle the larger client base. These would become the foundation to AFI’s bigger goals of expansion to other cities in Greece.
We became part of the team at AFI for 4 weeks and worked in collaboration with them to tackle their issues. We brainstormed ideas with design thinking sessions and followed the prototype approach to materialize the ideas. We gave them recommendations and backed them with tools that they could use to uplift their brand awareness and business operations. We presented our recommendations and prototypes to the AFI team, gathering and incorporating their feedback to finally reach our deliverables.
Our team of 12 - Elpida (Greek word for Hope)
As part of a wider team of 12, we ensured that we connected with each other and learnt from our experiences. Having 12 people from 12 different countries on the same dinner table itself was a refreshing experience. I got the opportunity to interact with a truly international team (UK, Germany, US, Czech Republic, Brazil, Johannesburg, Columbia, China) and these colleagues were from all walks of the SAP ecosystem (Pre Sales, Sales, Ariba, Concur, Product Support, Design and Co-innovation and so many more). A mere 1 month with such a diverse team offered a lot of learning experiences. There were instances where I was pleasantly surprised to know that SAP had so many things to offer to its clients as well as to its employees.
What kept us going…
A period of four weeks was very small to achieve all the things that we thought we wanted to help AFI with. It was a high pressure situation where we wanted to do so much for our organization in such a small time and also keep up with our interactions with the other teams.
A very big relief was the location of our sabbatical — Greece! We always had places to visit, places to eat, places to shop, places to relax , places to enjoy the sunset— but all this had to be done in the 3 weekends we had and in the evenings. We visited a few beaches, the Acropolis (I did miss this one for some sleep… :)), the Lycabettus hill and of course our last weekend was at the Mykonos Island!! I must say, our team really made use of each and every moment we had in Greece. We worked late into nights to ensure that we could relax and unwind on the weekends. Yes, it was almost a round the clock engagement! And it was totally worth it!
As I look back…
All my doubts on my own capabilities to contribute, vanished into the second week of the assignment. I realized there was so much we had to offer from our experience at SAP. My experiences with the customer systems back at my work helped me in structuring the business processes at AFI. I remember stretching myself on consecutive days to research on things we never knew, to get the deliverables together, to interact with more people, to talk more, to learn more, to make people smile more — and I don’t regret even a single moment. I learnt how to interact with a customer and to listen to and empathize with them on their pain points in order to devise the best suitable solution for them. This program gave me an opportunity to evolve myself both professionally and personally and it helped me understand a lot about my strengths and weaknesses. It was truly a huge learning experience and I would suggest that anyone who is blessed with such an opportunity should grab it and make the most out of it.
Early Talents, go for it..you will never regret it…
I would like to spread the word about this program more to other early talents at SAP (I was always referred to as one by one of our team members at Greece…:)) This is an opportunity that will help you the most in your entire professional life! You will learn so much about SAP, about other cultures, about yourself — and all this in one month of pressure, work and fun!!! It could not get better!
Conclusion
This was one of my best experiences at SAP and I feel proud to work for a company that provides employees with such opportunities. I sincerely thank my manager for being so supportive, the SAP Social Sabbatical team for giving me this opportunity and PYXERA Global for organizing this in the best possible way. I hope this blog post reaches all the SAP employees who are looking for an inspiration to join this program and more importantly I hope this does serve as an inspiration and motivates them to join it! Scroll down for a few pictures that give some glimpses of our stay in Greece.
For more pictures and stories on the Social Sabbatical in Greece, please have a look at the blogs by my fellow team members (links pasted below):
Team HIGGS : Lee Barnard from the SAP User Assistance team in Waldorf, Joey Buitendag from the Seller Account Management, Ariba in Johannesburg and Sheldon Piao from SAP Product Support team in China. This team worked with HIGGS, an NGO that incubates and accelerates other NGOs in Greece.
Jane Gray, part of the SAP Customer Storytelling team in UK and my wonderful team-mate at AFI.
Petra Schoenborn, part of the SAP COO Communication & Change Management Team in Germany and my sweetest friend.
Anthony Jakubiak, part of the SAP’s Design & User Experience team in Palo Alto. You will love his blog if you are a fan of talking through pictures.
Barbara Reis, part of the Partner Service Delivery Team in Brazil and my lovely room mate at the hotel in Mykonos.
