I’ve always been a believer in the saying that by doing good, good comes to you. This feeling has been the driving force behind a series of community engagement programmes from Intel Security/McAfee’s Aylesbury office.

This all started about 8 years ago when we came last in an internal company global survey of employee engagement. We needed to do something to change the team’s perspective and while we could have enacted a number of initiatives to make changes at the site, there wouldn’t have been anything that would have moved the needle broadly across all areas. I felt that something more fundamental would be needed that would essentially change the attitude to our purpose.

CoderDojo

In terms of what employees could give back, we embarked on a series of community projects based around education and security protection. We started with the CoderDojo initiative. CoderDojo is an international movement that runs coding clubs to inspire children in computer programming. We run a dojo at the Aylesbury office that utilises the office facilities and the knowledge of the engineers who work there to inspire children from the surrounding area. The children can work on programming projects with Raspberry Pi computers and Intel Galileo boards and learn about key programming skills that they can use in their studies, as well as in the future.

Online Safety for Kids

Another education programme that we run is Online Safety for Kids (OSK). The sessions are designed to be relevant to different age groups. Trained staff volunteers work with local junior schools and secondary schools using online safety learning materials suitable for each age group.

The volunteers also run events for parents, to coincide with the presentations given to their children. Parents often feel that their children know more about IT than they do and they find it incredibly helpful to have the Intel Security/McAfee staff share their knowledge with them. Participating in the OSK sessions is very popular and presenters feel that they are making a valuable contribution to the local area. Through the scheme we have educated over 15,000 students and parents to date - and not just in Buckinghamshire.

The downside of Online Safety for Kids is that the Aylesbury team is a finite resource and they can only reach a certain amount of people. To try and answer this, I asked the staff how they could increase the OSK reach. One member of the research team asked if we had considered working with Bletchley Park, the home of the British codebreakers in the Second World War. As soon as the suggestion was made, it seemed the obvious choice for a partnership. The team feel that there is a natural affinity with what Intel Security/McAfee does now and what Bletchley Park is famous for. We approached Bletchley Park to propose the idea to partner with them and to use Bletchley Park’s heritage to drive the online safety message forward.

Cyber Security exhibition at Bletchley Park

They came back with what can only be called an audacious proposal. They said: ‘Why not create a cyber security exhibition in the soon-to-be-refurbished Block C wartime codebreaking building?’ They wanted the exhibition to run for five years and for it to be something meaningful, not just something that runs for one season. They also suggested a full time education officer; someone who is dedicated to delivering the Online Safety for Kids message.

Outside of North America, this would be our biggest public partnership and we felt that this would be a meaningful thing to do. It’s close to us, and it’s something that we thought staff would want to engage with and go there to deliver. Running Online Safety for Kids sessions with the education officer at Bletchley Park means we could really broaden our reach; it has over 200,000 visitors each year. The exhibition is fully interactive and is designed to test what people know already, but also to operate at every different knowledge level. The aim is that there is something for everyone, whether young or old, technical or otherwise.

An impressive change in staff

As an employer the most important thing is to encourage and set the tone. We have been involved in these community projects for 8 years now and the most impressive change in staff is that we have had many separate community initiatives and activities that now self start and gain their own momentum. Additionally when problems are encountered in the office people are far more likely to self organise and solve the problem themselves.

Contributing to society through projects like these needs to be part of who we are as a company. When we started we did it because it felt like it was the right thing to do, but we had no idea whether these initiatives would succeed and if they did, how far they would go. Today, however, there is a renewed sense of community, engagement and self-enablement in our office. And as for the internal scores on employee engagement - we’re now rated best in class for the last 3 years. It’s a good place to be.