Workplace

Trust

Our vision is to become the trusted market leader in our sector and our workforce policies and actions that support this are making AXA an employer of choice in the UK. We entered the Sunday Times best big companies to work for survey in 2008 and were ranked 19th. In 2009 our ranking improved to 15th place. In 2008, our Best People strategy also won the CBI Human Capital award in the ‘managing change’ category.

Our Intensive Customer Experience (ICE) initiative has been extremely successful. As part of ICE, every employee in the UK took part in a one-day event exploring issues of personal and professional trust, customers’ views of trust, and how to support our values of being available, attentive and reliable. We are planning to use the ICE programme with employees around the world through our global learning function, AXA Universite.

Diversity

We know that employing people from the widest possible pool of talent provides competitive advantage and reflects the communities in which we operate.  We want to be a leading employer and ensure that all of our employees have an equal opportunity to succeed and that everyone is valued for the unique contribution that they bring to the workplace. Kevin Murray, Group Chief Operating and Information Officer,  is part of the UK Executive Committee and is our Diversity Champion. Kevin’s role is to ensure that Diversity and Inclusion is always considered when decisions are made at Executive Committee meetings.

For the last few years we have been awarded the Jobcentre Plus ‘Positive about Disabled People’ symbol in recognition of our positive attitude towards job applications from disabled people. At the moment we are focusing on having a gender balanced workforce. In March 2011, Paul Evans, AXA UK CEO, hosted a panel discussion between UK and Group senior leaders on the subject of Gender Balance at AXA. An area that AXA do well in is maternity leave return rates. This is a positive indication that we have policies that support women employees and allow for flexible working.  In 2010 around 80% of our employees who went on maternity leave decided to return to work.

In 2008, we ran a communication campaign and eLearning module on diversity to raise employee awareness about diversity at AXA. The campaign was such a success it won a Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development award in 2009. This success came from bringing diversity to life and making it accessible to all employees. We managed this by creating three fictitious characters, each presenting a different diversity issue (age, gender, ethnicity) that were applying for an imaginary role with AXA. The characters posted blogs on the intranet and employees could follow their progress and vote on which candidate they thought was best for the job. The campaign caught on and there were 13,000 hits on recruitment story intranet pages. The story also prompted employees to take the diversity eLearning module and almost 7,000 employees took part.