Both for the country and for the Stoplight’s Network of Companies, 2020 was a year of great changes. We are a network whose mission is to contribute to the well-being of employees, so that, in a year that brought instability to the living conditions of all Paraguayans, we chose to reaffirm our commitment (with workers) by providing them with security and opportunities to face the situation in the best possible way with their families.

How do we manage that? We realized that more than competition, mutual support is the basis for overcoming and achieving goals. It is not a revelation, since we have been working together on initiatives since 2013, but 2020 required us to change the ways of organizing ourselves and made the need to cooperate to get out of difficulties much more evident.

Through our monthly inter-company meetings, the representatives of the companies share their main achievements and challenges when implementing actions aimed at improving the quality of life of employees. These meetings, which were traditionally held in person, began to take place in virtual format, which allowed for greater participation and the presence of international guests who were experts in different areas.

In one of the meetings, several companies expressed the need to have workshops on topics that had been affected by the pandemic, such as children’s education, health and financial management. In response, we organized the Stoplight Web Seminar, a series of workshops and virtual talks that ended in December with a total of 9 talks and the participation of more than 270 collaborators, through the different spaces we addressed the topics requested by the members of the Network, and each talk was facilitated in turn by professionals from member companies, such as Grupo Sueñolar, who offered a dissertation on Occupational Health with a doctor from their internal team. This made it possible to take advantage of the existing capacity in the companies themselves to train employees without incurring in higher expenses.

 Regarding the Stoplight tool, from Fundación Paraguaya we developed the “Stoplight at home,” a self-assessment that allows families and organizations to identify how the pandemic affected families in different aspects. It was applied by companies such as Cadena Farmacenter, which used the results to direct its actions to the main needs detected through the survey.

The conventional stoplight, which measures the quality of life of workers in 51 indicators, was used during the year by 12 companies, reaching 1,166 families of employees and 4,553 people, the survey was carried out mainly in virtual format through the mobile app of the Stoplight, which is quite an achievement since it speeds up the time of survey taking. And as the last relevant figure of the year, we highlight that 5 companies, despite the difficulties due to the context, carried out an impact measurement of the Stoplight to know the effect that the program and the actions had on families; the results showed that extreme poverty was reduced by 44% and poverty 5% in 309 families from these 5 companies.

What these data show is that the commitment and sustained action in Corporate Social Responsibility with the internal public has observable positive effects, in the short and medium term, because in addition to improving the living conditions of workers, they recognize and value opportunities that their company offers, increasing its commitment and contributing to the institutional image. This is the return received by the companies of the Network for their dedication to initiatives within the Stoplight.