Now, More Than Ever, Is the Time to Focus on the We Outside Boku Not the Me

It may seem like an unusual time to talk about gratitude, but it is at times like these that showing others our gratitude for the things they do to help us, is most important. When this is all over, we’ll remember the people who thought of others rather than themselves.

As lockdowns extend and tighten, we are seeing the economic impact that Coronavirus is having not just on major industries like airlines and hotels, but also on local businesses whose services Boku offices have long relied on. The people who clean our space, water our plants, stock our kitchens, and cater our lunches that are suffering

We are very aware and grateful that Boku is among the fortunate – our business and way of working has been less affected and more adaptable to the current state of affairs than others, we are still able to serve our merchants and carrier partners so that they can provide the services that people stuck at home need access to.

We have always prided ourselves on wanting to do the right thing, a notion that spurred us to join other companies in instituting mandatory working from home well ahead of government mandates. But we realise that from our position, we can go beyond ensuring our employees doing their part to stop the spread of Coronavirus and supporting our frontline healthcare workers by staying home.

Now, more than ever, it is important for us to focus on the We outside Boku, not the Me – by helping those who are not weathering the storm so well, and turning our everyday gratitude for the various service workers and small businesses that help us, into practical gestures of kindness and goodwill.

As a result our employees have started a group called the Corona Committee, responsible for exploring new and different ways we can continue to support our community during and beyond this crisis, which for Boku, encompasses several cities around the world, all of which have been affected by this pandemic. It is still early days, but so far, we have committed to:

• Continuing to pay all the service workers who help keep our office running on a daily basis. We aren’t going to let them down just because we’re not in the office. Now is when they need us.
• Donating the funds we would usually spend on feeding the staff in our offices to worthy causes in our local communities via our new Boku Lunch Program. Every Boku employee can nominate a worthy cause, be that a local restaurant, bar, charity or individual in need (such as a neighbour who is out of work) and every week we will randomly select three employee nominated causes in Europe, Asia and the US (nine in total) to donate to.

This is just the beginning of our efforts and we look forward to sharing the other ways our employees come up with to spread our gratitude and goodwill through our local communities across the globe.