As Head of Corporate Citizenship at Lenovo, Santiago Mendez Galvis is passionate about the business case for diversity and in breaking down barriers between D&I groups to create greater power. He discusses the social impact that Lenovo projects are having on underrepresented communities through technology and education, particularly women in STEM—and why Lenovo’s annual ‘Love on Month of Service’ initiative in October is the perfect time to start ‘giving back’.
Have you always been interested in D&I and philanthropy and how has this developed during your career?
I’ve worked for Lenovo for 17 years and most of my career had been focused on marketing and commercial roles. I became a Head of Corporate Citizenship in 2021, but before then I was someone who believed you should keep your private life separate from work and have a different persona in each. In my own private life, I was very active around supporting LGBTIQ+ rights, but I didn’t feel I should bring that into my work life for many years. Two things created a change of heart around that. The first was a 360-degree assessment in 2014 with my team where questions about my sexual orientation where raised and I realized it was the time to come out of the closet and bring my authentic self at work, eventually this help me to strength my relationship with my colleagues, build confidence and activate my philanthropy network at the corporate level.
How did your own urge to ‘give back’ change your career trajectory?
The next year in 2015 there was a refugee crisis in Europe, and a lot of anti-migrant sentiment across the continent. At the same time a lot of anti-LGBTI legislations were being put in place, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe. I’m based in Slovakia, where I’ve lived for 20 years, but I am originally from Colombia, so I’m a migrant myself and like many other colleagues we felt the need to show the value cultural diversity brings at the workplace. For that I created a small employee resource group focused on promoting the intersectionality of diversity in the workplace. One of the best ways that you can get people to understand the value of diversity is through engaging with the community, and I started doing a lot of community outreach, getting donations for marginalized communities and mobilizing people to volunteer. Within a year, we had 40 members in the group and we were then able to create events attended by hundreds of employees. We were very successful as a group, and we actually won Employee Network of the Year at the 2017 European Diversity Awards. That attracted the attention of the executive team, which rocketed the programme forward. I kept doing this work in parallel with my official commercial role for a while, but soon realised I was very motivated by and successful at these activations and promoting diversity and inclusion in the workplace. So, when the opportunity for my current role came up in 2021, I phoned my current boss and said to her, ‘I might not have the CV you require for this, but I have the experience, the enthusiasm and the drive to make it happen’.
What is corporate citizenship and why is it so important to business now?
Corporate citizenship is all the activities and resources that organizations give back to communities through grants, employee volunteer activities or donations–and the powerful social impact they can make. Three years ago, corporate citizenship was a ‘nice to have’ in business; nowadays it is a must. Primarily because there are regulations that companies need to meet, but also because it’s now key to attracting and retaining talent. It’s getting more and more common for people to be looking for jobs and companies that share their values and to bring this up when they come to interviews. And as employees, if they share the same values, they are very engaged, committed to perform and loyal to these companies.
How can volunteering help you grow your career? What skills does it develop?
There are many different types of volunteering that can help improve soft and hard skills across the board. A high-value volunteer could be involved in mentoring, coaching, presenting or educating, and if you want to gain people management or organisation skills, you can even volunteer to manage a programme yourself. In terms of the social aspect, you have many chances to meet people and network, which is also useful now that many people work remotely. Even if you have a team you work in, it’s a great opportunity to team build and get to know people within it. All of this counts in the development plan of an employee. If you look at my own career, technically, all the experience I have was gained through the volunteering and that counted toward the job that I eventually landed. Research has also shown that giving your time to charity or volunteering has a positive impact not only on performance but on wellbeing and mental health–so we also promote that with our employees.
Are there any areas of D&I that particularly interest you?
I’m a big believer in the intersectionality of diversity. I prefer to work with groups of people who have a common interest and in all the years that I have been in employee engagement I have realised that employees allies tend to support multiple causes . I want to create groups of employees that are focused on the whole spectrum of diversity in EMEA. In this way we can work together to gain mass and leverage the power of that. There are amazing synergies between gender equity and LGBTI groups or between multi-cultural diversity and accessibility for example. If you divide them, they can start competing for resources, attention or support, but if you keep them all together it can be amazing.
How has your work with Lenovo impacted local communities?
Lenovo’s North Star is smart technology for all, and the Lenovo Foundation mission is to provide education and access to technology to underrepresented or marginalised communities. At least 80% of EMEA Philanthropy investment goes into women in STEM programmes; there is still a gender gap that we need to fill in the IT industry, so we partner with NGOs that focus on either upskilling or reskilling, and support and engage employees in that. In the UK, we work with Stemettes, and we have partnerships in Germany, France and Africa including one of my favourite successes, our ROBO Girl initiative launched in 2022. This free programme encourages young women in South African schools to learn robotics and coding. Our biggest asset is our people, and our team is also in charge of employee engagement, so we make sure they have access to volunteer opportunities that allow them to share their knowledge and give back through our programmes.
Can we all be ‘philanthropists’ and where do we start around ‘giving back’?
I feel it is something which is within each of us, and I recommend finding causes that are close to your heart first, whether that is an NGO around accessibility or gender equity for example. Things can grow slowly but the biggest asset we all have to give is time. Let your passion drive you and you’ll find that the opportunities to do and give more will come to you organically. Lenovo’s Love on Month of Service is a great chance to start volunteering if you haven’t before. Within EMEA, last year’s initiative saw 1,305 employees volunteer 7,975 hours which in turn directly impacted 10,216 individuals. [1]
What’s in the pipeline now for you and for Lenovo around its corporate citizenship work?
I want to continue to plant the seed that there is real business value in diversity and in giving back, either from the reputational point of view of the company or from the employee point of view. As a team, we are now very focused on AI for good and working on programmes to upskill organisations on AI solutions so they can develop and deploy them. We ran a survey with nonprofit organisations a couple of months ago and asked them what was stopping them developing AI solutions. The answer that came back was ‘capacity building and education resources’. We are partnering with a Polish NGO called Tech to the Rescue which is running an AI bootcamp that will be supported by us to provide resources to the nonprofits so they can start building this project. This is a long-term process, so we should see solutions in two years’ time, but our impact now is in making sure we contribute to providing, ethical, non-biased AI—and use our resources to provide social impact with the technology that we have.
[1]https://news.lenovo.com/lenovos-love-on-month-of-service-unleashing-impact-in-emea/
