MACH Volunteering: one stone, two stones,...three thousand stones

  My name is Elena, I am an Audience Marketing Manager
in the Dynamics team. 

  I started in November 2014 and since then CRM and
ERP systems constitute the Microsoft world I live in.
My task is to make customers want and use
our business solutions by organising different marketing activities.
Those can be events, fairs, presentations, Webinars,
  but also digital approaches like banner ads and online distribution
  of reference videos and blog posts. In this B2B business it is extremely challenging to reach the right audience which are usually business decision makers of all departments – sales, marketing, finance, operations and IT. In addition, selling cloud solutions, which the global corporate strategy put its focus on, is a very difficult business, especially in Switzerland. My task is to think of ways how we can still convince those customers and present business cloud solutions in an appealing way. 

MACH Volunteering, September 2015

"Be honest - who of you has the time and feels like going to the mountains to remove stones from the hills?"

That was the question of one MACH while driving together in the car. The answer was clear – almost all of us were too busy to go for a seemingly business irrelevant volunteering activity that we had been planning for the MACH community this year. In Dischmatal, near Davos, ten brave MACHS committed themselves for two days to contribute to the local alp hygiene by removing stones from the hills to make space for grasslands and cows.
In practice, we had to use serious agrarian instruments to mostly hit out the stones of all sizes from the soil. At a first glance, a pretty monotonous and physically exhausting exercise. In the beginning we almost seemed to feel guilty to not go after our highly relevant daily work in the office. Yet, after a while spending on the hills, surrounded by a beautiful landscape and no sound except for the ring of the cow bells, one’s mind concentrating on nothing than on the aim to get the stones out of the soil, we realized a large benefit and pleasure in this work – to see the results of your work immediately; something that we are usually not used to at Microsoft.
In addition, the heartwarming gratitude expressed by the farmers, Jürg and Niklas, that were taking care of us, made every single stone worth being pulled out. After two days and five to six hours daily on the field we filled around six small trucks with stones – a moment of pride which made us forget the muscle ache and blisters for a little while.

In the evening we had the comfort to relax in a nice, cosy bed and breakfast near Davos which was run by a nice elderly lady.
The ones who were expecting wild after hours with heavy MACH drinking had to be disappointed – hard work made us physically really tired so we actually saved our energies for the stone lifting.
Despite all the pain and initial scepticism towards our activity, the curious cows accompanying us, the beautiful landscape emphasized by sunny weather and the great team spirit that evolved during the work, made our 2,5 days of volunteering a really nice experience which we definitely shouldn’t miss out next year.