Growing together

People work with us in 16 countries and from around 20 different occupational groups – from apprentices in sales to mathematicians in the actuarial division and doctors in our medical centre of excellence. Despite our different nationalities, educational backgrounds, characters and personalities we all share something very important: a passion for UNIQA and a desire to play an active role in shaping the future.

The central principle here is that: we look to support our customers in living safer, better and longer lives. And: the image that we have in the outside world is also the one that we want to experience within the company.

Welcomed & supported

First impressions count, even for a company. UNIQA has therefore developed a two-day onboarding programme for new employees in order to provide them with an exciting and informative start at the company. In addition to facilitating content, networking with colleagues also plays an important part in this, as the initial personal contacts made here help to make future work processes easier. Even the company’s leaders get to know the new employees right from the start: CEO Andreas Brandstetter takes the time to welcome them personally and to answer their questions. Four of these events took place in 2018 with a total of 219 employees attending (105 women and 114 men).

In order to draw talented people’s attention to us as a potential employer at an early stage, we attach particular importance to contact with high potentials within the framework of university exchanges. For instance, we are one of the main sponsors of the WU Top League mentoring programme for university students and also sponsor various events at the University of Vienna. We regularly present at Austria’s largest careers fair Career Calling, and also took part in the Long Night of Companies careers event for the first time in 2018.

User-friendly & clear – the new UNIQA training platform

Accompanied learning is part of everyday life at UNIQA. This is why we actively support our employees with their personal and professional development through a comprehensive range of educational and continuing education. E-learning has been available to all employees in field sales and the back office for some time, including via smartphone since 2018.

We have also been processing all of our training including a wide-ranging programme of topics via the new UNIQA learning platform since 2018, from the broad-based training catalogue and an overview of the training courses completed to booking options, access to learning materials and options for carpooling with other course participants.

Implementation of the Insurance Distribution Directive (IDD) has also been made easier through the new training platform, with each course displaying how many IDD-related lessons it contains. Both employees and managers have full automatic visibility into whether the required 15 lessons of IDD-related further training have already been completed.

The plan is for this modern learning platform now to be implemented in all major countries at UNIQA International as a Group-wide solution.

Develop & promote

UNIQA has also been breaking new ground with managerial training with a flexible programme since 2016. This is a voluntary programme based on individual responsibility and flexibility with modules that can be freely selected and combined. After being in place for just two years, both our SHAPE and NEXT International managerial programmes can already point to 106 and 71 successful graduates respectively. While SHAPE is aimed at top executives in Austria as well as all Board members at UNIQA International’s subsidiaries, NEXT International aims to boost the skills of our top international talent.

NEXT AT, our third management programme aimed at middle managers and currently featuring 271 participants, is running until mid-2019.

Question & improve

We carried out a new type of employee survey for the first time in September 2017 and now plan to establish it as the new standard within the UNIQA Group. As part of this survey, employees are asked openly for their opinions and assessments with the aim of contributing towards improving commitment, satisfaction and motivation with concrete actions. In response to the results UNIQA managers in Austria defined more than 1,000 specific improvement measures in 2018, with work now ongoing to implement them.

We carried out a brief review in Austria in September 2018 of successful implementation of these measures. Both the participant rate and the results of this survey were well above the figures for the previous year. A comprehensive employee survey is now pending once again for 2019. Broadly based employee surveys also took place in 2018 in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia (including the Group Service Centre), Romania and Bosnia and Herzegovina. A further survey is also planned in 2019 in Ukraine.

Flexible & trustworthy

One of the measures implemented in 2018 as a direct response to the results of the employee survey was the introduction of the “mobile working” scheme. With this, UNIQA is responding to a desire expressed by many employees for greater emphasis on individual responsibility for actions within the company.

Since then, employees of UNIQA Austria have been able to work at home, on the road or wherever they wish for up to eight days each month. There are two things that we hope to achieve with this: we want to encourage a management style based on trust and performance, and at the same time we also want to increase employee satisfaction even further. This means that in addition to accommodating our existing employees’ expectations of a modern employer, we are also specifically accounting for demands coming from new applicants.

International & mobile

The diversity of our team is one of our strengths and an important building block for success as an international group. We actively promote the transfer of knowledge and cooperation between our national companies so that we can exploit this potential in a targeted way. Employees can also work abroad in our foreign subsidiaries as part of our mobility programme, and gain valuable international career experience by assuming temporary executive roles or key functions or by collaborating on international projects.

Sharing in our success

Commitment and performance are valued highly at UNIQA and are thus also rewarded accordingly. A bonus system for managers and employees in key positions based on the company’s financial success and a performance-related bonus scheme for field sales management are therefore essential components in our variable remuneration schemes.

We have also developed a profit-sharing bonus system for employees with no variable remuneration components, meaning that other UNIQA employees can also share in the company’s positive development as appropriate. In addition, we provide long-term support for our employees in the form of retirement pensions, occupational disability benefits and survivors’ pensions.

Work & life balance

Our multi-faceted and diverse offering allows employees to experience on a practical level that “better living” is actually part of UNIQA’s DNA: from UNIQA’s children’s days, the holiday circus camp for employees’ children together with our Family Day and the UNIQA daughters’ day, to various health incentives (including krav maga, Pilates, Sing@work), massages, options for a “daddy month” after the birth of a child, annual meetings with employees on parental leave, the “Healthy Management” workshop, the KeepBalance mental health hotline, and the Mystery Lunch, through to our dry cleaning service directly at head office and a pharmacist delivery service with employee discounts – UNIQA has plenty of opportunities on offer to make everyday life easier for employees and to promote a work/life balance.