Sun Life Give Back to Inspire and Engage with Helping Hands

Giving Back to Inspire and Engage

Sun Life Financial has been a trusted name in Hong Kong for more than 125 years, guided by a single purpose which is to help clients achieve lifetime financial security and healthier lives. With a diverse portfolio of protection, investment, and wealth management solutions for individuals, businesses, and institutions, Sun Life continues to shape a brighter financial future for generations of Hong Kong families.

To inspire and motivate their advisors to reach the prestigious Million Dollar Round Table (MDRT) — a global benchmark for excellence in the life insurance and financial services profession. Sun Life Financial (Hong Kong) partnered with Team Building Asia, the region’s trusted expert in corporate team building and experiential learning.

Together, they developed a custom-designed event that blended inspiration, competition, and collaboration. The program aimed to energise advisors, strengthen their sense of purpose, and align them with Sun Life’s mission of empowering clients through financial confidence and wellbeing.

The MDRT, representing over 66,000 top-performing professionals across more than 500 companies in 72 countries and territories, symbolises the highest standard of professional achievement. Through this partnership, Sun Life reaffirmed its commitment to nurturing a high-performance culture that celebrates excellence, integrity, and client impact.

Giving Back to Inspire and Engage

To meet the objectives, Team Building Asia developed an original and creative idea incorporating a giving back element to engage attendees and highlight the MDRT’s values.

The agreed activity involved advisors producing prosthetic hands for land-mine victims. Creative elements were added to enhance engagement. These well layered elements were implemented throughout the entire process and ensured teams had to work together to be successful.

For example, to connect the internal spring to the central digit of the prosthetic hand, required one team member to hold the central digit, another team member to hold the spring and the remaining team members to place it internally.

Immersive Experience for Long Lasting & Meaningful Learning

At the commencement of the event, an inspiring video was shown featuring people with residual limbs and the challenges they face in their everyday lives such as eating and writing. The delegates were very receptive and engaged when they discovered that they would be creating hands for them to use. Enabling people like those shown in the video to start rebuilding their lives and in some cases, return to work, the delegates quickly realised that this event was much bigger than themselves.

For the delegates to experience and understand what it was like to live with a disability, they were required to cover their dominant hand with a closed-ended sleeve to simulate a residual limb. This meant not only would they connect with the recipient of the prosthetic hand but it would also compel them to work together and collaborate effectively.

Core Values Reflected Through Each Activity

Embodying Sun Life’s core values of caring, professional, inspiring and winning, the teams quickly set about completing the challenge in front of them.

They used their professional knowledge in the form of step-by-step instruction manuals and with the help of facilitators from Team Building Asia, who coached them through some of the challenging technical parts.

A strict ethical code was used throughout as delegates rigorously took time to perform quality controls at each stage of building and testing to ensure all working parts were fit for purpose.

Achieving an outstanding client service came in the form of delegates attaching the prosthetic hand to their own simulated residual limbs and attempting to write, which to their own surprise they could do successfully and automatically, almost without thinking.

At the completion of the event, attendees decorated the carrying case for the prosthetic hand and included a heart-felt personal note to the recipient to further complete outstanding client service before performing one more quality control check of the hand before sending to the end-user.