Caregiving cause resonates with McKesson

CHICAGO —When companies embark on sustainability initiatives or pursue other cause-related issues, they tend to experience some unintended side effects.

While the motivations behind why companies get involved with these issues vary—from a pure desire to make a difference in the world or to simply shield themselves from criticism of business practices—what companies often find is that cause-related programs can serve as a rallying point for employees to feel good about the companies they work for and enables them to share in a larger sense of purpose.

That was the case at McKesson’s medical and surgical division, where Toby Capps serves as an account manager in the Seattle area. Among his responsibilities, Capps worked with the charitable organization World Vision to create an innovative Caregiver Kit program that aligned with McKesson’s role in the health care arena.

Then, at its national sales meeting attended by more than 1,000 people, employees working in assembly line fashion will build orange plastic briefcases with a wide range of personal hygiene and medical products to be used by those caring for AIDS patients in Africa. The kits include items such as soap, washcloths, cotton balls, disposable gloves and medicines for pain relief and diarrhea. Such items aren’t readily available in parts of Africa.

“There is no such thing as cotton balls in Africa and those that they do have are washed in dirty water and laid out to dry and used over and over again,” said Capps.

This year alone, McKesson employees assembled 70,000 Caregiver Kits that were distributed by World Vision in 17 African countries. “We got behind the program to help people thousands of miles away and it ended up benefiting our company because people were part of something that was bigger than all of us,” Capps said. “When we built Care-giver Kits at our national sales meeting, it truly charged us up as a corporation.”

Previously, McKesson was spending $250,000 annually on national sales meetings where participants would receive a new golf shirt or bag with the company’s logo that usually wound up in the back of a closet.