Blue Bags of Hope

Classes for most schools have already resumed this month. Students, especially those in gradeschool are surely excited to meet new friends and see old ones. What they are also enthusiastic about is the fact that they get to use their newly bought school materials – notebook, crayon set with almost a hundred colors to choose from,  a cool bag and a lot more. This is true for children hailing from well off families. Sadly,  some don’t get to experience this to the point that their parents can’t even afford to buy them even the basic necessities of a gradeschooler.

For years now,  it has been one of the advocacies of Security Bank Foundation to give school bags with basic supplies to less fortunate students of select schools in the metro and in the provinces. This year,  the chosen recipients are elementary students from some public schools in Pasay and Cavite.

The Foundation together with Security Bank Human Resources Development Division, organized a bag packing event which gathered a number of employees who volunteered to help. I was one of those who joined this good cause together with some of my colleagues from General Services Division. It was my second time participating here and it’s great to see co-workers gathered and sparing some time to help. Even our boss was there! The spirit of bayanihan was so alive and people tirelessly did their assigned task without any complaints.

Photo grabbed from Security Bank Facebook page. 

Team QA. 

Everything was so organized. We were divided in two groups and each personnel has his own task to do. There are those who handle placing the items inside the bag – notebooks,  pad papers,  glue,  ruler,  pencil,  eraser,  sharpener,  scissors,  crayons and water color. There’s one or two people assigned for each supply and the bag is passed on to the next person until all items are complete. I was on the far end of the table doing some QA work as we are tasked to check if all supplies are complete and with correct quantity in each bag. Then finally,  there are those assigned to group these bags in tens so they’d be easily tallied for inventory. We were able to pack some 3,000 bags in total.

A mountain of blue bags!

Aside from the feeling of fulfillment that we are able to help and make these children happy in our own little way,  what’s good about this activity is that employees get to be part of a greater cause. It shows how our company values CSR and the desire to instill the spirit of volunteerism among its employees. It was also a perfect outlet for us to take a quick break from the tiring duties at work and mingle with others. Kudos to Security Bank and to all the volunteers!  

Continuous Learning at Work

Just last June 5 & 6, I attended a training organized by my employer, Security Bank. This is entitled “Effective Business Communication” which is really interesting and applicable at work.

I arrived just almost in time on the first day. I came all the way from Dasma (Cavite and not the posh village in Makati) and it was a Monday. Our venue by the way is in Ortigas where the SBC Academy is – yes my employer has its own training school where they devise very nice programs / seminars for the employees.

We had two speakers who are both from a third party consulting firm – one in the morning and the other in the afternoon. Yeka, for the morning sesh, was a former FA of PAL and Cebu Pacific. This is pretty obvious with the way she speaks. She even sampled us a spiel she used to deliver when she was still with PAL. Yeka was really nice and friendly…and a “thankful” person ‘coz she always say “thank you” when we recite, when we ask questions, when we’re on time, etc. The afternoon was taken care of by Joe who’s a balikbayan from Canada. He used to work for call centers here during the time that the BPO industry is just starting. He’s cool and very accommodating.

A very helpful guide on how to use prepositions.

Yeka sharing some useful web sites and mobile apps for improving writing skill.

The two-day seminar went very well. We discussed everything from the very basic stuffs to the complicated ones – nouns, pronouns, verb, subject and predicate, sentence type, conjunctions, negative statements and a lot more. It may seem boring by looking into the topics but Yeka and Joe made sure it’ll be fun through the interactive games and activities they prepared. We even had pre-test and post-test to check if there were improvements after the training. I hope there was but we are yet to receive the result of the tests.

Free coffee and afternoon merienda were served to us which is a bonus.

Colleagues from General Services who are also present during the 2-day workshop.

What’s also interesting about attending seminars is you get to see new & familiar faces and make friends with them. We even had participants from the provincial branches as far as Cagayan. We had a good mix of attendees coming from various units so the discussions are very diverse.

Thanks to my employer that I get to attend talks like this once in a while. This is part of their program for continuous improvement of each personnel as we are required to complete at least 24 hours of training per year. Prior to this writing course, I took “Assertive Communication” which is another good program offered by the SBC Academy.

I see this as an opportunity to learn more and take a quick break as well from the busy days at work. Looking forward to my next!