KoreaToday Woori Aviva pursues servant leadership

By Kim Da-ye

Staff reporter

Kang Mee-young, an HR manager at Woori Aviva Life Insurance, joined the company’s volunteer program at Seunggawon last year, a Buddhist welfare facility for the disabled and learned some valuable lessons.

“I was initially uncertain of how I would work together with disabled children. However, it did not take long to realize that they are not different from us. I learned a lot from that experience,” says Kang, who plans to go back this year.

Kang says that she marveled at how pure minded the children were and that she enjoyed turning three hundred heads of cabbage into kimchi with them.

Seunggawon, where severely disabled kids are well cared for, has worked with Woori Aviva since December 2008, according to the life insurance firm. In each quarter, Aviva employees dedicate their time to voluntary activities including taking the children to Yeouido to enjoy the cherry blossom trees.

Woori Aviva CEO Seon Hwan-kyu, Executive Vice President Gavin Dickson, and 30 other employees visited the facility to help 90 severely disabled kids with their dinner, dishwashing and cleaning.

Also with the collected donations from the employees’ own pockets, they presented a new washing machine and laptops to the welfare facility which belongs to the Buddhist Joong-ang Sangha University.

This activity is only part of a larger voluntary initiative taken by Woori Aviva, which aims to join the nation’s top 10 life insurance companies. This year, Woori Financial Group and Britain’s Aviva are celebrating their second anniversary together after the merger.

Other activities include building a sisterhood relationship with Tandong village in Chungju, North Chungcheong Province. Woori Aviva has provided a variety of supports for the village by helping them sell apples and buying organic foods directly from the farmers of the village.

The insurance firm says it even connected its volunteer work at Seunggawon to its relationship with Tandong village by visiting the town with the children from the facility. The Seunggawon children picked apples and put name tags on the trees they adopted with the volunteers from Woori Aviva.

Part of an employee’s salary is saved every month and ultimately goes to teenage heads of households, the elderly who live alone and other minorities in society. Woori Aviva says it introduced in 2010 the Matching Grant rule which requires the firm to donate as much as its employees do.

“The longest journey inside humans is that from the head to the heart. I believe it means the knowledge in the head is difficult to be put into action with warm passion,” says Woori Aviva CEO Seon.

“It may be easy to talk about ‘servant leadership,’ but doing so isn’t easy. I hope Woori Aviva Life continues its corporate social responsibility program with passion.”