Leaders, do you look beyond your radar and ask how you can really make a difference and impact lives?

Corporate leaders oftentimes need to go beyond all the standard KPIs and targets to ask themselves a question that is frequently off the beaten path of their operational priorities. Consider for a moment why your company exists and what its main goals are. Today, we witness a growing number of corporate activists advocating diversity, equality, environmental concerns, and social issues. This prompts us to reconsider our goals and consider whether we can expand the influence that businesses can play. Majority of companies are aware that there are a lot more stakeholders and purposes that an organization may serve than the traditional model that is largely focused on shareholders. 

My selection at Infomate was the culmination of a spectacular set of occasions, so amazing that I continue to think there must have been a rationale.  This has been repeatedly reaffirmed over the course of our 17-year professional relationship as we have witnessed the enormous influence that businesses can truly have in improving communities, changing lives, and revolutionizing societies.

Listed below are some of the areas that each of our companies can impact, while sharing some examples from Infomate’s 17-year history;

Employees are our beating heart - One of the proudest moments in a leader's career is when a member of your team or an ex-colleague approaches you and expresses how much working for your firm has influenced and transformed their lives/careers for the better. Over the course of 17 years, I've had the honor to work with more than 2,000 people. We've consistently gone beyond the box, and some of our employee-centric initiatives include:

•  Training and development (build-up of Infomate university for online sources of learning)
•   Deployments and promotions into our parent company which is Sri Lanka’s largest listed conglomerate.
•   Deployments/promotions overseas into client offices.
•    Cross functional project teams    

Customers - We take great pride in assisting our clients in achieving world-class processes, but our engagement goes beyond that. We identify innovative solutions to their issues, reinvent their work, liberate them from mundane tasks, and give them the opportunity to concentrate on thinking outside the box.

Corporate social responsibility - Infomate has its unique CSR projects, such as an orphanage project, which aims to inspire and upskill youngsters while providing them with a variety of life and career skills to help them.  

Students - Infomate being an accredited training partner of several global accounting bodies, we meticulously follow a procedure that is well-structured for mentoring students, and this has helped institutionalize the mentoring strategy. Infomate is an active contributor to the industry association and national community.