Employee matters

This section describes the impacts of our employees on our business activities and relationships, along with the impacts of UNIQA’s business activities and relationships on our employees. The focus here is on our “People and culture” strategy as well as the associated concepts and measures. We believe our engagement in this area is essential. If UNIQA fails to take diversity and inclusion as well as training and education sufficiently into account, there is a risk that talented individuals and skilled workers will leave. The resulting financial and operational barriers have a negative impact not only on UNIQA but also on the labour market.

New HR initiatives were launched and implemented in 2022 in accordance with our UNIQA 3.0 strategy, both across the Group and focused on our core market of Austria. The main priorities in this regard were optimising our employee experience and delivering comprehensive structural and corporate culture projects that are designed to make UNIQA the sector’s most attractive employer by 2024. Using the concept of customer experience as the basis, namely the customer journey, the employee experience covers everything that employees experience within a company. Human Resources is responsible for developing strategies and processes to shape employee experience as positively as possible, thus helping to improve employee motivation and loyalty.

The purpose of using a targeted employee experience management process is to ensure employees enjoy positive experiences, starting from the application process right through to the day they leave the Company. All of the experiences our employees gain during their time at UNIQA can be illustrated along the employee journey defined for the UNIQA Group.

We focused on the following areas in 2022:

• Implementation of Group Standards in recruiting/onboarding
• Implementation of Group-wide HR policy
• Implementation of Group-wide HR survey tool

To ensure we can make focused improvements in the future, we are increasingly using our newly designed employee survey to collect feedback as part of the “Voice of Employee (VoE)” survey. This information then helps us to create new HR initiatives.

Our diversity and inclusion strategy focuses on two areas:

• Equal pay: Our goals were to ensure equal pay for work of equal value and reduce the pay gap in back office roles at our Austrian site to significantly below 1 per cent, a target which had already been exceeded in 2022 at 0.6 per cent. In our second home market, namely CEE, we are focused on our large subsidiaries in Poland, Czechia and Slovakia, implementing standardised and regular equal pay analyses and corresponding measures in these countries by 2023.
• More women in management positions: The proportion of women in management functions was 43.0 per cent in 2022. Our aim by 2023 is to increase the proportion of women in senior positions at our Austrian site, in back office positions in general and, more specifically, in management functions by 5  percentage points so as to improve gender diversity at all management levels. So far, we have increased this proportion by 1.5  percentage points on average. To improve the framework conditions for this, we are focused on implementing measures such as mentoring, childcare support, work from home opportunities and extra measures to enhance flexible working hours.

The positive feedback we obtained from the training and education courses implemented as a result of Covid-19 also points towards “new learning” in the future, where we will continue to maximise digital formats such as webinars and e-learning courses on our online platform. As a result, our training and continuing education content is available to all our employees across Austria in the same quality – regardless of when or where they access it. On average, our employees invested 14.81 hours in training and education during the reporting year. We have offered a new management development programme across the entire UNIQA Group since autumn 2022. This specifically addresses the requirements for our forward-looking UNIQA 3.0 programme and aims to transform our management into inspiring coach leaders. The focus here is on practical competencies and management skills, such as “new leadership”, agility, communication and collaboration.

To improve the provision of flexible working hours, we came up with measures in our “New Way of Working” project and introduced a works agreement for our Austrian site that lays down uniform rules on the extended use of work from home arrangements. The agreement now provides three options with varying levels of working from home. The ability to reduce working hours from full-time to part-time, or vice versa, can be agreed with managers on an individual basis so that we can cover all kinds of needs that may arise for our employees. All the usual services offered to employees with children, such as supervised children’s days and summer camps, parental leave meetings, Taking Daughters to Work Day etc., were finally resumed after a two-year pause owing to Covid-19.

In 2022, we also ran regular pulse check surveys to monitor how back office and field sales were feeling, incorporating their views into our continuous improvement measures. The pulse check surveys are to be established as a standardised, Group-wide survey and will also be conducted on a quarterly basis in 2023. The current overall satisfaction of employees in Austria is 3.9 out of 5 stars.

To ensure health and safety measures are implemented across the board, we align ourselves primarily with the Austrian Health and Safety at Work Act, the Austrian Workplace Regulations and the Austrian Screen Working Regulations. Safety professionals, supported by safety officers, are responsible for ensuring that these provisions are enforced and complied with. Both the safety professionals and the safety officers are responsible for all permanent and temporary UNIQA employees in Austria.

We have also put measures in place for our employees with the new UNIQA 3.0 strategic programme. Our overriding objective is to become the most attractive employer in the industry by 2024.