From a sales perspective, my office didn’t do very well last quarter, which means that every single sales person is under immense pressure to massively overdeliver on their quota this quarter. Another reason this is frustrating is because this quarter is our company’s Impact Week, when everyone is expected to participate in volunteering in activities across the world that our .org ambassadors (that’s me) have organized for our respective offices. At the time of our all-hands office meeting today, only one sales person had signed up. Everyone else who signed up was from a post-sales team, including mine.

So our office leader asked me to discuss with the team at our all-hands why it was important and why I wanted as close to 100 percent participation. So I basically explained our company’s goals from a giving standpoint (1 percent of time, 1 percent of equity, 1 percent of product for the 1/1/1 pledge), and also said that I volunteered for personal reasons… not to mention the fact that, every single person in this room today has an immense amount of privilege: we all have steady paychecks, roofs over our heads, food on our table, literal free lunch at work… we have a lot to be thankful for. Check your privilege. Many other people are not that lucky, and if we could contribute just a couple hours of our time to help them, it could truly mean the world for those less fortunate than us.

Somehow after that, I got at least five people to sign up. Guilting people always works to get them to do what they don’t want to do, but they know they should do.